Second Threshold

Barbara Ford is a native of Berkeley, California, but has lived in a variety of places. Her father’s work kept her and her family on the move back and forth across the country, mostly from coast to coast. Travel remains an essential part of Ford’s life, enabling her to enlarge her point of view, evolve new material and continue the process of discover.

“I was always drawing as a child; I was shy and found drawing very comforting.” In the late sixties and early seventies, Ford studied lithography and intaglio printing at the California College of Arts and crafts in Oakland where she earned a fine arts degree in printmaking. Later in the early eighties, Barbara learned the technique of monoprinting and developed her skill as an intaglio printer at Phoenix Art Press. Her printmaking skills were further developed while working as a professional printer at a Los Angeles print studio which specialized in intaglio and relief printing. 

Barbara is currently working out of her own studio in Southern California where she works almost exclusively in the monoprint media. “Monoprinting is the most liberal graphic medium in which I’ve worked. It is such an immediate process that a lot more territory can be explored and charted. Working in the studio is very much like long distance driving, with the visual terrain slowly and continuously changing. The images that get committed to paper are merely freeze frames of the landscape I’m passing through. I see it as sort of an ongoing merry-go-round, a continuous loop of imagery that I jump onto when I start working. My aim is to move with it, to travel alongside and bring about an interaction.”