Barbara Bash has been engaged over the years in many forms of visual and verbal communication. Starting with a love of the alphabet, she has worked as a calligrapher, author, illustrator and teacher of Big Brush workshops. She has collaborated with musicians, storytellers, and dancers, exploring calligraphic performance art and doing graphic harvesting.
Her study of Dharma Art with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Chinese pictograms with Ed Young contributed to her understanding of Eastern principles expressed through Western art forms. Living in Boulder during the 1980’s Barbara became interested in botanical drawing and illustrated a book about the Southern Rocky Mountains. This curiosity for the natural world evolved into writing and illustrating a number of children’s books for Sierra Club about the world of trees, bats and urban birds . Her most recent book: True Nature: An Illustrated Journal of Four Seasons in Solitude (published in 2004 and expanded in 2013) explored the interweaving of the inner and outer landscape through drawing and meditation. Since 2008 she has continued this conversation on her visual blog – True Nature.
In 2002 Barbara joined the Creative Process team at the Authentic Leadership in Action conference where long time practitioners of the Naropa Arts were presenting the Dharma Art teachings as training for leadership. Over the next fourteen years, Barbara offered her Big Brush workshop in large group settings, created community arts rituals and collaborated in improvisational performances of spontaneous visual play. Barbara has trained in Nonviolent Communication and Focusing, weaving these practices into her teaching. She lives in the Hudson Valley of upstate New York.
Visit – barbarabash.com True Nature visual blog – barbarabash.blogspot.com Video of graphic harvest – Radical Compassion