During her Bennington College days, Windham artist Barb Bagshaw was caught in a descending spiral.
Each time she tried to cut back on the amount of marijuana she smoked, her eating disorder worsened. And each time she tried to conquer her bulimia – the eating disorder characterized by binging and purging – she began smoking more dope.
But through it all, her art – the tangible expression of the images in her mind – drew her and called her away from the edge of self-destruction.
At first, those images were dark, the result of growing up in what Bagshaw, a Long Island, New York native, calls “a no-talk family.”
“I was trying to anesthetize the pain,” she says. “The pain of my brokenness. I never had a childhood and I wasn’t allowed to feel anything or express myself.”
According to Bagshaw, her paintings are like her journals. And through the years, the images she recorded on those canvas pages have turned from dark to light as a series of events drew her from her misery to Christianity.
Nowadays, Bagshaw, 39, lectures on the relationship between the arts and healing, traveling as far away as Kenya, Africa, where she spoke at the Women’s International FIRE Conference.
Currently a long-term substitute art teacher at Lake Region Middle School, she has taught art in several venues through the years.
In addition, Bagshaw is the founder and current president of the New England Christian Arts Council. Begun in 2002, the group has hosted festivals each summer that have grown in size and scope to include all types of artists from many parts of the country.
But in the last two years, it is her artwork that has taken off.
“The Lord spoke to me a year or two ago to provoke, inspire and invite in my work,” she said.
With confidence in her calling as an artist, Bagshaw is convinced that people who are drawn to her art are being “attracted to the Lord in these paintings.” And she has sold 18 of them in the last year alone.
During this month, Bagshaw has a solo exhibition at the Inland Healing Art Gallery located at the Inland Hospital in Waterville. Twenty-four of her paintings are on display.
Her work can also be seen at Little Sebago Gallery in Windham and on her Web site, http://homepage.mac.com/bagshaw1.
“I strive to tell the truth,” says Bagshaw. “The truth about my core reality or the truth about my perception of my subject’s heart.”
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