Artist, designer, musician, dad.
As an artist, I like to play — to let process unfold and guide me, to be naïve, unpolished, wacky, and weird. My work is sometimes unpredictable, odd, raw, whimsical… and always human. None of that AI nonsense here.
Artist bio
Chris Barnes is an Olympia-based designer, musician, and artist. In contrast to the precision of professional design work, his studio practice is intuitive and improvisatory. He spent twenty years experimenting with ceramics: investigating collapsed forms, thin and sharp edges, carved surfaces, and intricate glazing. In 2020, he shifted his focus to painting, working with acrylic paint, pencil, ink, and collage on canvas, paper, and wood panel. Inspired by the complexity of nature, urban environments, and human emotion, Chris builds paintings through many overlapping layers — playing gloss against matte, opacity against transparency — to create rich, emergent surfaces. While his paintings vary in style, hallmarks include bold color, gestural marks, simple shapes, silly faces, and graffiti-like writing that stand out at first glance, while the complex interplay of layers and rhythm reveals itself to patient viewers.