An American in Paris: watercolor, notes artist Barbara Ernst Prey, "develops on its own…. You have an idea, but the beauty is in the process…. It's so fluid, and accidents can happen."

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SHOWCASING a collection of 80 works in watercolor that span her entire career, "An American View: Barbara Ernst Prey" provides valuable insight into the artistic paths this talented painter has chosen to follow. Drawing from the technical tradition of renowned artists such as Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper and carrying on their development of a truly American school, Prey's paintings nevertheless move in their own direction in terms of treatment and subject matter. They evoke the somewhat subtle symbols of the spirit of America and its cultural foundations--a fluttering home-sewn quilt, lingering twilight on the coast of Maine Adirondack chairs grouped in the family garden, lobster fisherman's dories at rest. These are images of the soul of the country and its unified spirit, emblems that speak to fifth-generation Americans as well as newly arrived immigrants.

"These [images] connect us, as viewers, to the land (and the sea): these scenes link us to place, history, and elemental human pursuits in the face of our frenetic, technology-dominated lives," writes exhibition curator Sarah Cash of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. The pristine landscapes and seascapes ... suggest the power and permanence of nature in contrast to the relative transience of human life.... Our imaginations not only are enticed by the houses, boats, and sheds themselves, but also by the exquisitely wrought details that animate the compositions....

"Prey has made art with intense energy and deep commitment since her childhood, and continues to do so at every juncture. In short, she possesses (and exhibits) a heartfelt passion for life, art, and their inherent and always provocative interconnectedness. Her career is 38 years young; her lifelong learning continues unabated. The artist continues to take the watercolor medium, which has an august role in the history of American art, to innovative places. Looking as well as seeing, she searches out new vistas, compositions, and ideas in the landscapes and environments that are her home....

"Recently, some of her work has exhibited more abstract tendencies. There are lone, large-scale boats set against stark backgrounds of deep blue water, not bounded by foreground or sky ('Vanishing Point'); buoy workshops whose exteriors read like color field paintings ('Finish Coat'); and minimal, nearly abstract seascapes devoid of the familiar boats ('Birdhouses'). Lone figures enliven more narrative works ('The Mender'), yet those images share with the other recent paintings a minimal sensibility and nearly mystical feeling. Perhaps Prey's observations on her choice of watercolor as a medium serve as the consummate metaphor for her ongoing development and experimentation as a painter. She remarks on the deep appeal of the technique's fluidity while recognizing its simultaneously unpredictable nature, which often necessitates improvisation."

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Watercolor, notes Prey, "develops on its own.... You have an idea, but the beauty is in the process.... It's so fluid, and accidents can happen."

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"... The rigors and complexities of Prey's own work may, to some, be eclipsed by the peacefulness of her images," suggest critics at the Water Street Gallery at the Seaman's Church Institute, New York, which exhibited Prey's work last year. "Pure form and hue are here judged on their own considerable merits, but the viewer is simultaneously challenged to question existing assumptions about the appearance of watercolor; these are, after all, more paintings than works on paper in their edge-to-edge color and in their many layers of wash, allowing alternating passages of translucency and opacity. Moreover, we are provoked to think more deeply about their subject matter; to imagine beyond the vessels and buildings, venturing in our mind's eye deep into the lives and spirits of their unseen occupants."

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"To me, houses are personifications of the people who live there," explains Prey. "There is so much life to a 200-year-old house--a story, a connection to our histories."

"Prey's [paintings] are immense, lovingly rendered, long meditations that test her limits in densely worked, all-over compositions alive from edge-to-edge with technical problems posed and powerfully solved," writes New York critic Charles Riley in one catalogue of her work. "... On this scale, at this extraordinarily lofty technical level, the significance of the achievement gradually dawns.... Prey as a virtuoso recognizes the need to dynamically challenge herself."

"Like all of us, artists are aware of what is going on in the world," writes Benjamin Gennochio of The New York limes, "and in some cases there is a sense that these pictures of pristine nature are also about the end of it--notably in Barbara Ernst Prey's paintings."