Adriana Barone's home, a stone's throw from the South Ferry on North Haven, reflects her two vocations -- art and healing. The spacious ground floor is adorned with a dazzling diversity of paintings and drawings, while the main room on the second floor is the site of a massage table and a dozen healing quartz crystal sound bowls, whose varying sizes yield a mesmerizing range of tones when she plays them.
The art came first, but followed a tortuous path over the years. Ms. Barone was raised in Elmont in what she has called a "chaotic and sometimes unsafe home," where her older sister bore the brunt of their mother's anger. "I would get out of the house, and I would just run in the neighborhood," she told a visitor. "I would draw, draw, draw, and I’d play games and I’d build forts, all kinds of creative things, constantly doing something where I was the director of everybody."
It never occurred to her that she might become an artist. She enrolled in Pratt Institute in 1967, but it was "by default. My sister's boyfriend went there, and it's the only school I visited."
She focused at first on studio art. In one class, she recalled, the teacher, after praising the construction she'd painstakingly created out of orange peels, egg cartons, and a crown with beads and feathers, proceeded to take it entirely apart -- to show the class how it was made -- while she watched in horror. "Art trauma," Ms. Barone called it, and afterward she shifted her focus to art history.
Things at Pratt got worse. There was a student strike in 1968 and again in 1969: "Nobody went to school." Yet more complicated challenges were ahead: "Moving from suburbia to the rawness of Bed-Stuy at a time of indiscriminate drug use blew my mind, and that took many years to recover from. I had emotional stuff all buried." Someone gave her belladonna around then, a toxic plant also known as deadly nightshade. "I kind of lost my mind. It was a fracturing experience, leaving me disconnected from my creative pulse, afraid to pick up a paintbrush."
She did manage to graduate, with a bachelor's in fine arts, and eventually, she said, "the classics grounded me. I needed to inhale deeply the roots of our shared humanity in order to heal. The violin concertos of Beethoven, the eerie melancholy of Satie, and the gorgeous agony of the Renaissance masters spoke to my soul, healing my sense of isolation. I went to all the libraries and museums. . . . That's how I started getting better."
Ms. Barone freelanced as a graphic designer in New York City for a time before being hired as the art director at National Lampoon and High Times magazines. She was moving in creative circles then, with friends who included Willem Dafoe, John Lurie, and Jean-Michal Basquiat, "but I was always a little apart, from the brokenness that happened back in college."
In the early 1990s, sober at last, she attended a healing seminar in New York and began, she said, experiencing powerful spiritual events both "visual and actual." A series of advanced energy healing schools in both New York and Sedona, Ariz., followed, and she opened her own practice in 1994.
Ms. Barone subsequently studied craniosacral therapy at the Upledger Institute, whose website describes the practice as "a gentle, hands-on approach that releases tensions deep in the body to relieve pain and dysfunction and improve whole-body health and performance." Her studies also included a "more scientific" four-year program at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing. Brennan was a former NASA physicist whose teaching combined high sense-perception skills with hands-on energy healing techniques.
Along the way, Ms. Barone somehow found time to become a certified yoga instructor.
Her practice now includes one-on-one therapy and group sessions, many held in her home. During the summer season she leads Sound and Silence at LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton. "I bring the healing bowls there, I do some guided meditation, and we do a little restorative yoga at the end."
Ms. Barone returned to art-making around 2000, creating three elaborate works on fabric composed of beads, crystals, and thread, each element affixed one by one. She started painting again later, first with animals as subjects, and then, after "a bad boyfriend, a whole bunch of demons."
For the most part, she said, she is "anti-idea, because sometimes when I have an idea I feel like I'm doing illustration. I don't want to do illustration." The works in her studio reflect a venturesome sensibility, ranging from almost childlike paintings of cats and other animals to abstraction, to geometric floral compositions.
"For one series, I put a rag in a bucket of paint and threw it onto the canvas. It's a pair of paintings that are like dancers." She sometimes picks up a brush when she wakes during the night. "It's almost better, because I can't see the color, I just put the shape in."
Melora Griffis, a painter from Shelter Island, has been an important influence and teacher, Ms. Barone said. "I was doing some Buddhas, and she was like, 'A Buddha?! Turn it over.' She pushed me a lot." She mentioned other artists whose work has been significant to her own: Sally Egbert, Stephanie Brody-Lederman, Basquiat, Helen Frankenthaler, Kryn Olson, and, of course, the Old Masters.
Ms. Barone was stuck one day on a large painting she'd been commissioned to create when Ms. Olson came to visit. "I said to Kryn that maybe she could help me, and we started painting canvases together." The koba series -- the title combines their initials -- consists of large paintings of flowers, some hard-edged and geometric, others more loosely representational. All have a strong color palette and a spray-painted background.
Ms. Barone first came to the East End in 1989 after her sister moved here, and moved here herself, full time, in 1992. Five years later, her sister died, and the artist-healer became a mother to her niece, Pia, who was 14 at the time. Pia, her children, and her husband live nearby now, in Sag Harbor.
"I really love energy healing and I love helping people," Ms. Barone said. But, she added, pausing, "something was missing. When I started to paint again, it was as if all the pieces finally fell into place. I am now painting, drawing, creating, and exploring different themes, mediums, and challenging myself -- making as many messes as I can."
