Purple Barn Green Field

About Purple Barn Green Field

This contemporary painting by Charles Pachter is a pop art image of a barn.

Charles Pachter’s elegant paintings of barns pay homage to Canada’s rural roots and its strong agricultural heritage. In this piece, the clean graphic lines of a purple barn with a turquoise-coloured roof plays against the expressive bright pink and white sky and the rich green field which blankets the foreground.
Pachter has been painting for more than six decades. A multi-talented artist, his work includes not only painting but sculpture, printmaking, design and writing. His impressive oeuvre has evolved over time and includes portraits of notable Canadians—the first, Margaret Atwood, and several series dedicated to Canadian images including the Queen, the moose, the maple leaf, and barns. Pachter first embraced pared-down form and a bright colour palette in the early seventies. Since then most of his artwork has been focused on imagery that ‘puts Canada at the forefront.’ His art is often imbued with his own cheeky brand of humour—the ‘Pachter puns’ as he puts it are always ‘intended.’ One of a series.

“I began painting barns back in the late eighties. I had a farm in Oro Medonte…just between Barrie and Orillia. The field would actually flood so it looked like a lake. And I did this one image of the barn reflecting. And then I started to look at the barn as this sort of primal simple bit of architecture that looks so eloquent. I took the whole concept and reduced it to its purest simplest form.” Charles Pachter

“The power and paradox of Pachter’s art is the way you sense a national character simply by standing in front of his work.” Tom Smart, St. John Telegraph

Charles Pachter studied at the University of Toronto, the Sorbonne in Paris and at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in the USA. Among his many accolades he is an Officer of the Order of Canada, a member of the Order of Ontario, a Chevalier of France’s Order of Arts and Letters and a recipient of the Queen’s Golden and Diamond Jubilee medals. He has had numerous solo exhibitions in Europe, Japan, the UK, India and Bangladesh.
His work is held in both private and public collections around the world including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Royal Ontario Museum and the McMichael Gallery.