Like many photographers I went digital in the nineties. This allowed me to go from simply taking photographs, to making photographs. Over the years I have developed two disparate styles. The first I call Fantasy Composites, which are a blend of several photographic images into a single work that is fairytale like visually but have adult themes: sex, bigotry, drugs, global warming, and so on; the second style is similar to traditional Urbanscape/Landscape photography. These works tend to depict a world decomposing slowly into oblivion, not unlike myself. The photographs shown on this site are from this latter series.

Forty-five years ago, I came across the Golden Gate Bridge on a Greyhound Bus. I was determined to be a painter and 45 years later, I am still painting. One of my friends asked me if I found inspiration from any of the places that I lived in as a Navy brat. Well, of course I do; all of us are formed by our past. But the inspiration is not necessarily direct. If I have any motto as an artist, it's this verse by T.S. Elliot: We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Art history often inspires my work. The still lifes from the series Vanitas are descendants of Dutch painting, with a personal twist. I am a film-based, darkroom-based photographer, best known for alternative-process prints, but I have also recently fallen in love with SX-70 Polaroid.

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My painting is a influenced by the power of nature. I paint first with water colors, then with encaustic paint, layers of hot beeswax, pigment and resin. I coerce it onto paintings as a hot, drippy, excitable mess. It changes quickly from a molten liquid to hard, solid matter. Heat is used throughout the process, especially to fuse layers of wax together. Encaustic painting is an alchemical process of extreme versatility. It is both additive and subtractive. It can be painted, sculpted, or moulded. Between the layers the process is quite unpredictable. 

For more than a decade I have been enthralled by the large cargo ships seen from the window of my studio at Pier 70, overlooking the San Francisco Bay. Light and weather transformed these ships into the gorgeous, mysterious protagonists of my paintings, and I contemplated their unknown journeys, and their heavily laden global implications.  Eleven years’ worth of ships have passed by my purview, and I have become familiar with their antics as they traverse the scene, or languish at anchor.

Now, as I paint, I find it may not be necessary to literally describe them.  Perhaps I am painting from the ship’s perspective, diving into the seascape through which they must venture in all weathers. Or perhaps they are still there, just beyond the veil of fog.  I search the light particles for the perfect unattainable spot, a shimmer of yellow-green beckoning me forward, a gentle blue that makes my heart ache, a swoop of turquoise that gives hope.  Traveling with my mind’s eye between sea, sky and shore, I imagine myself completely immersed in the colorscape.

Suzy Barnard, May 2014

Painting is a joyful practice for me. I delight in color, texture, design, and decisive mark-making.
My paintings are colorful, bold and energetic. I prefer to paint from direct observation because there is a surprise element in the immediate response to and discovery of the subject. Particularly when painting en plein air (outdoors, on site) or from a still life.

Eileen Downey was born San Francisco and received her art education at UC Berkeley with B.A. and M.A. degrees in painting. There she studied under Karl Kasten, Erle Loran, and John Haley and was greatly influenced in figurative style painting by her teacher, David Park. Prior to that she studied painting with Ruben Tam at the Brooklyn Museum School of Art. Later in her career, she returned to the academic world to receive an M.A. in drama. As a representational painter in the gestural style, her subjects are landscape, figures, and figures in landscape. Ms. Downey's work has been seen in solo and group exhibitions throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. Also, she has exhibited nationally and internationally.

Memories of my childhood play a tremendous role in my approach to creating art today. In my early years my mother a single parent lived in fear for my health due to the environmental hazards of San Francisco’s Hunters Point district. I suffered with asthma. Therefore, my innate interest to drawing and painting became that of a marriage over sports modeling my pursuit for constant spiritual mental and physical elevation. Having siblings among others as viewers of my work challenged me to go beyond my limitations. I remember my late grandmother a Barber and tailor sewing for hours at her machine after coming home from work. I would sit at her feet and draw on a paper bag with a pen, marker, crayon or a number two pencil. Art is an absolute liberation of my imagination, a tool I use to communicate and share my “inner-light.” I have regular memories of my childhood working at the local super market, helping elders with their shopping bags. Receiving tips helping my grandmother in her barber shop by sweeping up the hairs to find money mysteriously hidden in large clumps. At the end of each service, those who knew me would say, “Keep up the good work and never stop doing your art.” From these experiences, I have learned the treasure of focusing on minuet details. Eventually, I realized in my artistic process that I too would hide treasures. Living with this artistic expression is ritualistic in act and meditative in thought. Many times in the midst of creating, I experience dejavu. The realization of a single moment is obsolete only until it is captured by a memory of a stroke; a thought or pause for observation that I have discovered represents reincarnation of that tangible moment. Because of this, the very act of creating fine art is imparted with the relationship and responsibility I have with THE CREATOR. “The purpose of my existence.” I also feel it is my duty as self taught artist to have an internal dialog with the viewer and in many cases the ancestors, where at this point I find inspiration for artistic expression. Fathering my child, serving my community, drumming, martial arts, poetry, philosophy and ancestral facts (history), all helps with the enhancement of my expression, to captures the Black, experience in America. I enjoy manipulating dry water-based paints, oil pastels, ink pen, found objects or assemblage. Book illustrations, portraiture, and public art projects have brought me closer to my community. The purpose of my compositions is to elevate the social, political, environmental and spiritual issues of people deeply challenged by oppression. This has been my greatest enrapture. Kenya and Haiti are places for instance that influence the bold and dramatic colors in my works. Henry Ossawa Tanner, Aaron Douglas, John Biggers and Jean-Michel Basquiat (to name a few) has inspired my artistic direction. Being an artist and growing up with-in low-income housing projects, surrounded by the early stages of Hip-Hop, had an immense impact on my ability to create freely. Although this bold life style of music, poetry, art, dance, and intense research today seems barbaric. It nevertheless has influenced me to be boundless in my creative efforts to deliver messages of empowerment to the indigenous peoples of the world.