Barb Wauchope
Barb Wauchope is a retired sociologist and active artist living in Seacoast New Hampshire who shows her art throughout New England. She has always loved art in all of its forms, but her studies through the years have focused on visual arts and fine crafts.
Growing up in the mountains of western North Carolina, she began her artistic life with a prizewinning drawing of her cat in 1st grade! In Junior High she studied with a local junior college art professor and apprenticed with a copper enameling master in high school. Art seemed to be what she should do. She fell in love with Art History in college but not the sexist studio art department at her school. So, after moving to Boulder, Colorado, she spent the next ten years exploring batik and other textile techniques on her own and made a hippy-style living selling wall hangings featuring fanciful mythological animals. A solo show in town caught the eye of a local artist designer and the two collaborated for six years on one-of-a-kind hand-painted and batiked high fashion silk clothing.
When the opportunity arose, after a divorce and the realization that art, at least this art, wasn’t going to pay her bills, she looked for a career that she could love that would also support her. Having grown up with the Vietnam War and the civil rights battles of her native South, she was always involved in some way in the social issues of the day so she thought sociology might be a good fit. She moved to New Hampshire to live with her future husband, and studied and practiced sociology there for the next thirty years.
During this period, she didn’t stop doing art, but it was always sandwiched between writing proposals, reports, and presentations for work on the one hand, and soccer games, housecleaning, and family fun on the other. When retirement came, she was ready to immerse herself in the practice of art again. Having gone through nine years of graduate school, there was no way she was going back to college to get a B.F.A. She identified what she really wanted, which was a structured way to learn drawing and painting composition and techniques. She found it in a certificate program and has been happily painting and occasionally showing her work ever since.
In the years during and immediately after her certificate studies, travel and photography guided her studio and plein air painting. Initially she worked with oil on canvas and her subjects were typically landscapes, often with fantastic creatures hidden within rock and plant forms. But more recently, wanting to add her photographs and other media, she has been working with acrylics on canvas and board, supplemented by two and three dimensional materials and relief objects. This work, her "Bucket List" series, is inspired by visits to exotic but often poor countries, and reflects her concern and mixed emotions about tourism in wild or less developed places.