Adriana Barone was standing in her studio recently with three paintings from her Koba series.
Adriana Barone’s home, just a stone’s throw from South Ferry in North Haven, reflects her dual vocations: art and healing. Her spacious first floor is decorated with an amazing variety of paintings and drawings. Meanwhile, the main room on the second floor features her massage table and her bowl of 12 soothing crystal sounds. play them.
Art was born first, but over the years it took a winding path. Ms. Barone grew up in Elmont in what she described as a “chaotic and sometimes dangerous home,” and her older sister bore the brunt of her mother’s wrath. “I got out of the house and just ran around the neighborhood,” she told her visitor. “We were always doing something, drawing, painting, playing games, building forts, all kinds of creative things, and I was everyone’s director.”
She never dreamed that she could become an artist. She enrolled in Pratt Institute in 1967, which “was the default. Her sister’s boyfriend went there and it was the only school I visited.”
She initially focused on studio art. In one class, the teacher praised the structure they had painstakingly built using orange peels, egg cartons, and a beaded and feathered crown, then decided to show the class what it looked like. , began to completely disassemble it, she recalled. I made it… She watched on with a look of horror on her face. Ms. Barone calls it “art trauma” and has since shifted her focus to art history.
Pratt’s situation worsened. There were student strikes in 1968 and again in 1969, and “nobody went to school.” Moreover, he faced a complex task. “Moving from the suburbs to desolate Bed-Stuy during a time of promiscuous drug use devastated me, and it took me years to recover. I buried all my emotional stuff. Around that time, someone gave her some belladonna. Belladonna is a poisonous plant also known as deadly nightshade. “I lost my mind a little bit. It was a heart-breaking experience. I was cut off from my creative pulse and scared to pick up a paintbrush.”
She managed to graduate, received a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, and ultimately said, “Classics grounded me. In order to heal, I needed to inhale deeply into the roots of our common humanity.” .Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, an eerie melancholy.” She said, “Remembering the story of Satie, the brilliant suffering of the Renaissance masters spoke to my soul and soothed my sense of loneliness. I went to all the libraries and museums… I started to get better.”
Ms. Barone worked for a time as a freelance graphic designer in New York City before being hired as art director for National Lampoon and High Times magazines. At the time, she was part of a creative circle with friends such as Willem Dafoe, John Lurie, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, but she “always felt a little removed from the heartbreak that occurred during her college years.” I did.”
In the early 1990s, when she finally got sober, she attended a healing seminar in New York and began experiencing powerful spiritual events, “visually and physically,” she said. A series of her advanced energy healing schools were then opened in both New York and Sedona, Arizona, and in 1994 she opened her own clinic.
Barone went on to study craniosacral therapy at the Upledger Institute, which the institute’s website describes as a therapy that “releases deep tension in the body, relieves pain and dysfunction, and improves overall health and performance.” “A gentle, practical approach that improves.” Her studies also included a “more scientific” four-year program at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing. Brennan is a former NASA physicist whose teachings combined advanced sensory perception skills with practical energy healing techniques.
Along the way, Barone managed to find time to become a certified yoga instructor.
Her practice now includes one-on-one therapy and group sessions, much of which takes place in her home. During the summer, she leads Sound and Silence at Longhouse Reserve in East Hampton. “I’ll bring a healing bowl there, do some guided meditation, and do a little restorative yoga at the end.”
Barone returned to art around the year 2000, creating three elaborate pieces made of beads, crystals, and thread, each one attached to a piece of fabric. She then began painting again, first with animal subjects, then with “Bad Boyfriends, a Horde of Demons.”
Most of the time, she said, “I’m against ideas, because sometimes when I have an idea, I feel like I’m illustrating. I don’t want to do illustration.” Her studio’s work reflects an adventurous sensibility, from childish drawings of cats and other animals to abstract paintings and geometric floral compositions.
“For one series, I put a rag in a bucket of paint and threw it on the canvas. It’s two paintings, like dancers.” She sometimes picks up her brushes when she wakes up in the middle of the night. . “It’s almost better. I can’t see the color, so I just put in the shape.”
Barone said Melora Griffith, a painter from Shelter Island, was an important influence and teacher. “I was drawing some Buddha statues and she was like, ‘Buddha?! Turn it over.’ She pushed me a lot.” She also mentioned other artists whose work has been important to her, including Stephanie Brody-Leiderman, Basquiat, Helen Frankenthaler, Klyn Olsson, and, of course, the Old Masters.
One day, when Olson came to visit, Barone was engrossed in a large painting he had commissioned. “I told Klin that maybe he could help me, and together we started painting on canvas.” The koba series (the title is a combination of their initials) is a collection of large flower paintings. Some are hard-edged and geometric, while others are looser and more expressive. All have strong color palettes and spray-painted backgrounds.
Barone first came to the East End in 1989 after her sister moved here, and moved here full-time in 1992. Five years later, her older sister died and Ms. Barone, an artist and healer, became the mother of her niece Pia. She was 14 years old at the time. Pia, her children, and her husband currently live in nearby Sag Harbor.
“I love energy healing and I love helping people,” Barone said. But she stopped and said, “Something was missing. When I started painting again, it was as if all the pieces finally fell into place. I now paint and paint in a variety of subjects and mediums.” , creating, exploring and challenging ourselves,” he added. — Make it as confusing as possible. ”
