BIO
Known for her creative and unique “One of a Kind”jewelry design style, Bari Bing is now expressing her talent through Modern Art painting.Previously creating custom jewels for only private clients, Bari has opened her talent to the Painting World. Inspired by the energy and architecture of New York City and Miami, Bari uses mostly prime colors to get to the basics of expression, design and balance.
American abstract painter Bari Bing was born in Newark,New Jersey in 1950 and grew up in Lakewood, New Jersey in a family that was ripped apart by the Holocaust. Her father survived Dachau during World War ll but the rest of the family did not. "My household wasn't exactly the happiest place when growing up. We were always looking for survivors..No one survived."she said " I took refuge in my painting and drawing when I was a young child. That was my way of escaping".
Bari Bing started her Art studies at Syracuse University under Master Silversmith John Marshall. She then moved on to independent study in Philadelphia School of Art with designer Stanley Lechtzin. Following her desire and passion to explore , she was accepted to the prestigious Kunstgewerbeschule at the University of Zurich, Switzerland to study goldsmithing .
Bing returned to the United States in 1975 and went on to work for Art Carved Jewelers, designing their Eternity Ring Collection before striking out on her own as a custom jeweler. Having then won the Johnson Matthey Platinum Design Competition in 1979 and the DeBeers Diamonds for Men Competition in1980.
Then "Life happened". She married and began a
family. When her son was 18 months old, Bari was diagnosed with breast cancer from which she survived after six months of treatment, chemo and radiation. When her husband passed away in 2000 she finished raising her son, built a prosperous real estate business and took care of her aging parents for the next thirteen years.
"I had put Art on the back burner", and all that training and talent lay dormant until she remarried in 2017. A need to put paintings on the walls of their new Miami condo led Bari back to the brush. A subsequent chance conversation at the Palm Beach Art Show with noted gallery owner Alcinda Saphira led to a professional representation and her first solo show at the Venice Biennale.
"I hadn't painted for fifty years.. I used to paint still lifes"...but Bing's most current works vibrate with masterful abstraction . "Maturing as an adult your tastes do change, and I think that's a big part of what happened here. I started to look more at the essence of things and the core rather than the excess"
Bari's paintings are relentlessly composed, bright and positive. " What I'm describing is clear and distinct and has shape and form. We are a product of our environment and our upbringing, so my past had a definite bearing on my Art. When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I remember saying to myself "If my father could survive Dachau, I can get through this!"I developed a positive attitude from then on, to survive you have to be positive".
Bari Bing has arrived .. it just took her fifty years to get here!