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Barbara Lussier holds a B.F.A. degree from the University of Hartford. She has also studied at Ringling School of Art, Hartford College for Women, and the Lyme Academy. Her work has been exhibited throughout New England and internationally. She is represented in a number of corporate and private collections and has won numerous awards, including the Painting Award from the Connecticut Academy of Fine Art, the Award For Excellence in Painting from the Rockport Art Association 2006, 2007 and the Painting Award from the Academic Artist Association 2007. Barbara has taught plein air painting privately and through various educational institutions, including the Lyme Art Association, where she is an elected member and serves as President on the Board of Directors. She is a signature member of New England Plein Air Painters, is elected to the Rockport Art Association, where she served on the 2006-07 membership jury, and is a member of the Academic Artists Association and Oil Painters of America. She also was included in the Ct. Academy of Fine Arts 2005 exhibition, her work was chosen for the State Capitol Building and she was in the Region 2 American Society of Marine Artists juried show at the Art League of Long Island. She has served as Curator for The New England Landscape Invitational Show at the Lyme Art Association for several years. Her work is published in the Great Day Trips to Connecticut’s Critical Habitats. Her business experience includes ownership and operation of a commercial art gallery that sold contemporary and historical paintings. Barbara is a philosophically direct descendant of the Old Lyme and the American Hudson River School painters, and approaches her subject in a way that embraces these traditions- honoring nature and working from direct observation. Her landscapes explore the romance of color and light and have been described as “poetry.” The daughter of a consummate fisherman and boater, Barbara experienced the mysteries and wonder of the sea while roaming the coastline of Nahant, Massachusetts as a child. She followed her father to the warmer waters of Florida, where he fished and boated and she painted boating subjects while attending the Ringling School of Art. Later, she explored the south Pacific coastline, where she was sometimes dropped by helicopter on uninhabited islands to paint pink rocks and turquoise waters. At the hand of her mother, she learned the wildflowers and trees of New England, feeding her fervor for their majesty and esthetics. Currently, she lives in New England and supplies galleries with imagery of farmland, mountains, rocky shores and sandy beaches. A collector recently traded his boat for her painting so that she might further explore the creeks, rivers and coastline that are her favorite painting subjects.
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