Born and raised in New York City and a graduate of Hunter College, Bobbi Kharfen had very little formal art education.  With no history of art in her family, it was not until the early 1970s, when she was in her forties raising four children, that she took classes at the deCordova School in Lincoln, Massachusetts.  After exploring various media, such as silk screening and 3-dimensional woven sculptures, she focused on abstract painting, looking to artists such as Frankenthaler, Pollack and Louis for inspiration.  She studied how they applied paint and how they treated the raw canvas surface, and quickly explored new and personal techniques, developing her own sensibility of freedom and spontaneity.

Her childhood spent immersed in the culture of theater, film, fashion and music, creativity and independence of spirit became key to Kharfen’s approach to life.  She left the stifling social restrictions of New York imposed on women at the time to develop her own interests and self-identity.  Kharfen served as a civilian in the army in Japan, where she studied the arts of ikebana and doll making, and cultivated an interest in pottery.  After her service, and traveling around the world for 6 months, Kharfen was ready to start a family of her own.  Later, after having been a political activist for Hadassah, and with the support of her family, she recreated a new personal world through her art.

Kharfen’s passion for personal expression drew her to abstraction.  In her work, paintings are not preconceived. Through her love of the medium and her different techniques of applying paint, each piece develops a serendipitous life of its own.  She explores space and emotions through color, light, depth, transparency, form and scale, much in the way that music is composed.  Her work is evocative of her other cultural interests: literature, music, film and humor, as well as her exploration in fictional short story writing.  Just as her paintings are not preconceived, Kharfen’s message is not either.  Each viewer is free to connect to the work in their own way, and find within it their own personal meaning. 

Bobbi passed away on October 21, 2014.