Contributed by Angelica Maria Fuentes / California-based Karen Barbour, whose solo exhibition “Diamond Garden for Cornelia” is now up at Harkawik Gallery, has a compelling sense of narrative flow. She paints surrounded by her work, often moving from canvas to canvas to incorporate recurring motifs – florets, butterflies, and birds – as well as refine color, texture, and line. She began the Man and Bird in Landscape with Lanterns in the 1980s and completed it this year. Layered grids of meticulous patterns, shapes, and bodies reflect her patient, protracted process. Barbour’s choices of image are bold and playful, drawing especially on Abstract Impressionism. Flowering in Sufficient Abundance / Body Structure, in which totems, vines, and small figures dance blissfully, radiates modernist energy while being firmly contemporary.