barry10566

Barry James Lent's paintings are an exploration into the space between dreams and day to day reality. His obsessions, troubles and aspirations are given free license in his work. He uses the airbrush as his primary painting tool, citing the immediacy of the instrument as the perfect means to quickly capture feelings as visuals. His influences are the surrealists such as Ernst Fuchs, Francis Bacon and H.R. Giger, as well as a lifelong interest in the esoteric and the occult. Raised in a working class family, he is self taught and received no formal education in the arts.

He started his professional artistic career as a tattoo artist in 1997 at the Edge Tattoo Co. in New Haven, Connecticut, located on the perimeter of Yale campus. He was a member of the New Haven Arts Council from 2001 - 2003 and participated in the city wide studios exhibits for 2002 - 2003 with his graphite and colored pencil illustrations. He became a self employed tattoo artist in 2003 after having his work exhibited in various tattoo publications. During the next few years he began painting which quickly became his passion.

In 2012 after several years of painting and illustrating for musical acts and selling original work to private collectors, he launched the Devil's Design Co. website and online store where he made available moderately priced merchandise and posters of his artwork. The success of this venture continued to grow, and allowed him to focus solely on his art.

In 2014 he started working with various esoteric/occult authors and several original works were reproduced in their subsequent publications. He created an original painting on a custom guitar for the Dean Guitar Co. U.S.A. for the Six String Masterpiece traveling exhibit, alongside work by other popular artists such as Paul Booth and designs by music icons such as Ozzy Osbourne and Kirk Hammet of Metallica. The design is now on permanent exhibit at Dean's U.S.A. Headquarters.

In 2015-16 he had his premiere solo exhibit featuring 40 works in Westchester, New York. He had also shown in a dual artist exhibit, and was invited to show in galleries in Italy and Spain. He is currently a member of the Peekskill Arts Alliance and Arts Westchester of Westchester County New York, where he currently resides.