Linda Barlow

I was born in Manchester and did Arts Foundation at Bolton College of Art. I turned down a place at Brighton Art College to go cycling around Europe. This inspired a lifelong love of travelling. I moved to Shropshire, had two children and did an Open University degree in Social Sciences, still always drawing and creating.

I started making large textile pieces based on my social science research on such subjects as artists who were also mothers and the conflicts involved in managing time and headspace; and a larger project on menopausal women. These projects included making textile animations and can be seen on my website. They also formed part of my MA at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Becoming disillusioned by the fact that textiles were regarded as “craft” and not taken seriously as art, and the fact that my quilts were becoming increasingly painterly, I started focussing solely on painting. At the same time I started going on residencies in various countries and my work became more landscape based.I am drawn to remote, island landscapes and I have worked in Ireland, Iceland, Shetland, Finland and Latvia.

I work in oil and cold wax and always try to incorporate tiny bits of the landscape into my paintings, embedding sand, ash, stones etc into the work so that the landscape actually becomes part of the painting. Increasingly, when on residencies I use acrylics as oils are difficult to transport on planes (customs officials seem to like to confiscate them!) and they take ages to dry.

I am a full member of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists and exhibit with them regularly.