12 APRIL 2-8, 2026 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | 100 Red Barns SANDRA PRATT BELIEVES THAT RED BARNS CAN CONNECT A DIVIDED AMERICA. BY MIC HAEL ROBERT S Red barns may seem like a vestige of a bygone era. But Boulder painter Sandra Pratt believes they have a very contemporary signifi cance. “It might be the last image that all Ameri- cans share,” Pratt says. “It crosses every political and regional divide, and there’s something powerful about that right now — something that belongs to everyone.” With this in mind, Pratt has embarked on an ambitious project: a series of 100 paintings featuring red barns. And despite the size and scope of this undertaking, she plans to move quickly, in part because many of these inspirational objects are vanishing from the national scene. “I love to see falling-down barns — until they tear them down completely,” she says. “That’s the thing with barns. In Boulder, they’ve taken down some really beautiful barns, and I feel like they’re not really relo- cating them. They’re just going away.” Originally from the Chicago area, Pratt moved to northern Colorado as a tween, in part because her grandmother was in search of a drier climate. Her mother made her living as a realtor, while her father was a vendor who mainly worked at dog shows. Pratt frequently tagged along with him on the job, “but I wouldn’t say it sprang some wonderful creativity,” she admits. “Animal art is popu- lar, but it’s not my thing.” Instead, Pratt found herself drawn to nature writ large. “My parents weren’t really big hiking- type people, so it was mostly my own desire to go out into the wild, into the wilderness — and I just started painting it, because it was so vast. Painting outside is a big part of my work. You learn so much from the color and value of everything you see.” In the years that followed, Pratt realized that she wanted to make painting her career — and she eventually earned admission to the prestigious School of the Art Institute of Chicago. But after a semester and a half, she concluded that “it didn’t really work for me, and I wanted to be a self-taught artist. Not to put down the college, of course, but I wanted to learn more about technique and why things were the way they were and not just be an academic and get a teaching degree and teach art. I wanted to do more painting rather than staying inside a high school and studying art theory and art history. I was more interested in the physicality of painting.” No surprise, then, that Pratt found herself gravitating toward the brawny fi eld of palette- knife painting — using a fl exible steel blade rather than a brush to apply paint to canvas. Plenty of acclaimed artists have included this tactic in their toolbox, including Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso and Rembrandt. But Pratt was particularly inspired by predecessors who specialized in the approach, includ- ing Russia-born Nicolai Fechin (1881-1955), regarded as one of the twentieth century’s most distinctive portraitists, and Sergei Bon- gart (1918-1985), a native of the Ukraine who characterized his dynamic modus operandi as “color fi rst, subject last.” Developing a distinctive palette-knife style — she refers to the vibrant slabs and waves she uses to convey a backdrop as “contemporary impressionism on the edge of realism” — required both passion and per- sistence. “It defi nitely evolved,” Pratt allows. “I used my palette knife to do some color charts, and I realized just how much easier it was for me to paint with one. It’s very fast, very direct and charged with emotion. It’s really just one stroke, so the whole painting is composed of all these single strokes. That’s the power I feel – making all those strokes together. And if it doesn’t work, you have to scrape it off and do it again. I took a lot of practice learning how to do it.” The sweeping quality of Pratt’s meth- odology drew her to coastlines, where she earned a reputation for capturing oceans at their most vast and imposing; such pieces are frequently on display at New Masters in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, and Pierce Galleries in Nantucket, Massachusetts, both of which regularly feature her offerings. But the Pratt works usually spotlighted by Boulder’s SmithKlein Gallery, Denver’s Abend Gallery and her show- places in Park City, Utah; Bend, Oregon; Scottsdale, Arizona; Santa Fe, New Mexico and Tulsa, Okla- homa tend toward land- scapes. And red barns are often cast in a starring role. One reason, Pratt ex- plains, is her fascination with the accidental history behind the hue associated with such structures. “Peo- ple used linseed oil, which has a rust color, with other binders because it was the cheapest way to seal their barn. It was a very cheaply made necessity that’s now so iconic. The idea of a red barn in a distant fi eld has become a symbol of the American pastoral.” There’s a practical reason for placing a red barn in such a setting, Pratt acknowledges: “I feel like it’s just a really great focal point in a painting to have a little barn for the eye to rest on.” But more important to her is a sense of discovery that can amplify the experience for viewers. She’s certainly not immune to this pro- cess. “It’s special when you fi nd a red barn,” she says. “There are a lot of cool barns in West Virginia, and the Midwest has some beautiful barns as well. I took a trip with girlfriends and we would just photograph barns, because they’re so gorgeous.” How to properly capture such sublimity? Repetition, Pratt decided. “That’s why I wanted to do a hundred barn paintings — to just get really good at it.” She laughs as she adds, “My last one is going to be great. That one is just going to knock you over.” More seriously, she maintains that “it’s a good challenge for an artist to focus on a sub- ject so diligently and work on it to gain a better understanding of form and shadow and light.” Pratt has already completed six of the paintings, and she hopes to fi nish the other 94 by sometime this summer. They’ll be available for purchase at her roster of galler- ies, as well as her website, SandraPratt.com. In part, the pieces are an act of preservation for the red barn, and she knows that others don’t want the buildings to entirely disappear. “I was recently in Steamboat, and I saw a barn with a fence around it, which was pretty cool,” she says. “I’m glad people are trying to protect some of the history of the red barn.” As for her series, the red barns — all 100 of them — will be “the heartbeat of the paintings. When you have this barn, people see it and feel something. They respond to it, and as an artist, that’s the best thing ever to hear from someone. They get what you’re trying to say.” Email the author at [email protected]. CULTURE KEEP UP ON DENVER ARTS AND CULTURE AT WESTWORD.COM/ARTS Sandra Pratt believes barns are a unifying image visually and psychologically. A portrait of Sandra Pratt. SANDRA PRATT SANDRA PRATT
