By Erica Reid

Painter Maggie Barnes had only been home in Cincinnati for two weeks when she received news that made her jaw drop.

Barnes had been conducting a deep-dive into the music of Paul McCartney for an extensive series of paintings inspired by his work. In the summer of 2023 she traveled to the UK to gather inspiration, including studying and painting the sites that McCartney explores in his 1991 Liverpool Oratorio. A mere two weeks after that trip ended, her daughter phoned to ask if she had heard the news: in 2024, Cincinnati Opera would be giving the world premiere performance of the stage adaptation of the Liverpool Oratorio.

“I told her, you have to be mistaken,” Barnes remembers, still astounded.

Barnes reached out to the Opera and a partnership was formed. Her series of eight paintings tracing the storyline of the Liverpool Oratorio, including the striking Liverpool Cathedral, will be displayed in the P&G Founders Lounge during the opera’s premiere, and another two dozen related works will grace the walls of nearby Wash Park Art Gallery.

For Barnes, this lucky happenstance is only one of countless ways that art has added delight to her life. Proudly sober since 2003 — a fact she is comfortable discussing publicly — Barnes looks back on the way that painting and other artistic pursuits have helped her guide her life. After losing an artist friend due to issues related to alcoholism, she began looking for healthy ways to process her grief.

“This idea came to me: why not pick up a paintbrush instead of a drink?” she recalls. Barnes had never painted in a serious way before, but 20 years later, has hardly missed a day at her easel. “I found out I paint as obsessively and as emphatically as I ever drank,” she says with a wry laugh. Barnes feels her art and her sobriety are so entwined it’s difficult to separate them — not only did she pursue painting to support her sobriety, but the tools and processes of her sobriety have also made her a stronger artist. “I painted like my life depended on it,” she adds. “And it did.”