Soon after her two recent NYC shows came down, I was lucky to visit the studio of Barbara Friedman --lucky because not only was I able to see Barbara’s current paintings in the space they were created, but also her earlier work, so different from what she does now, but still suggesting what was to come. At Pace University’s Gallery, quite a few of Barbara’s large, 80x67-inch paintings were hanging, and at Frosh & Co Gallery, smaller but equally potent paintings were on view. In these paintings, Barbara blurs the line between abstraction and representation, with abstract shapes of gorgeous, often unusual color harmonies and textures created by the chance effects of thinned oil paint poured and splattered across the canvas, and representational, deliberately drawn details of mainly animal heads, feet, etc. coaxed out of the shadows of painted clouds, much as the man-in-the-moon emerges from craters. But the early work suggests much more is going on with her current art than the simple cleverness at finding hidden images in beautiful color-field abstract shapes. Barbara’s earliest paintings on view in her home are dexterously drawn and quite figurative, though disconcerting in their spatial and scale dislocations and questionable logic between elements. As the years progress, these tightly rendered paintings give way to ones where the figuration is obscured with long smudges made by a kind of squeegee dragged across the surface, a technique that anticipates the contrasts between drawn reality and poured paint seen today. In other words, perhaps her current work reflects a sense of dislocation, irreverence, finding humor within the serious, the disjuncture between her love of animals and their threatened extinctions, or the absurdity of contemporary life. Friedman’s paintings have an elegance that grows from her deft handling of paint and the surfaces she creates, but drawings of her mother, made with walnut ink and resist on vellum during her mom’s last days, show just how deeply emotional and empathic Barbara can be as well.