BARBARA HINES CREATES SACRED SPACE AT THE MUSEUM OF BIBLICAL ART.
DIVINE GUIDANCE
BY NANCY COHEN ISRAEL
erusalem, that city of limestone and God, is
the subject of Mysteries, Signs, and Wonders: The
Art of Barbara Hines, on view at the Museum of
Born in Germany and raised in Australia,
Hines grew up in a Christian home. As a teenager,
she became a student of comparative religions and
began incorporating Hindu and Sufi philosophies.
She eventually became a practicing Buddhist, even
serving on the board of one of the Dalai Lama’s
organizations. But the revelation of her Jewish roots
in the 1990s led her on a new journey. She says the
discovery “meant I had to rethink my identity.” She
began to study Judaism in earnest and found a solid
connection to it.
In the 1970s, Hines went to New York to study
at the New York School of Design and the Pratt
JInstitute. The former taught her to render in scale. At Pratt, she studied environmental design. At around the same time that she rediscovered Judaism, she
decided to begin using her architectural drawing
skills to paint cityscapes. “Art is an expression,” she
says, so choosing Jerusalem as her focus seemed to
be the logical choice. She says, “At that time, my art
was focused on landscapes. Using my architectural
drawing skills was a natural lead-in to painting
cityscapes.”
This body of work is an apotheosis of her years
of study. After 15 years of living in London, she and
her husband, international real estate developer,
Gerald D. Hines, moved to Provence, France. Here,
the possibilities for her work blossomed. She could
work on large canvases outdoors and she could work
on multiple paintings, making it possible to build up
layers of paint. It also gave her the freedom to use a
International artist Barbara Hines draws inspiration from Israel and the Holy Land for her impressionistic contemporary canvases.
CONTEMPORARIES
