From the Foreword to " colin barclay paintings " :

Born and raised in the Hudson Valley, Colin Barclay has a deep appreciation for the natural beauty of the region that inspired North America’s first internationally recognized school of painting: The Hudson River School. Now a resident of Maine, Colin has widened his view to include the Northeast as far as Newfoundland. He is in fact a 21st Century Hudson River School painter, especially influenced by the 19th Century Luminists, captivated by the revelatory powers of Nature’s drama as expressed in the play of light and shadow.

The alluring radiance and emotional depth of Colin’s paintings have captivated a steadily growing audience. For many, he is the painter of the Hudson Valley, the artist who best captures the essence of what draws people to live there now: the underlying natural beauty of the area. Colin ignores the outward signs of human presence to focus on the timeless, yet his paintings express distinctly human sensations of awe, emotional turbulence and ultimately peacefulness and equanimity attained after inner struggle. His work is distinctly modern in mood, almost abstract in its simplification of form, its elimination of extraneous detail and its subtly expressive use of color. Yet those who see his paintings are often struck by how “real” they are. This unique, immediately recognizable look of Colin’s work, at once real and abstract, timeless and contemporary is clear whether he is painting Storm King on the Hudson, Mt. Washington in New

Hampshire, the bays of Newfoundland or the ocean views of Maine.