During a 50-year career, Barbara Brash experimented to extend the limits of the graphic medium, working in and combining woodcuts, linocuts, lithographs and screenprints, so that she became a pivotal artist in a post-WWII printmaking revival in Melbourne.
Her work attracted the attention of the public as early as 1953; "Unusual grey and silver invitation cards have been designed by Barbara Brash for the "winter dinner" dance the Whernside Junior Auxiliary of the Royal Melbourne Hospital will hold at Ciro's on 19 June.
"[3] Brash began printmaking in 1947 when she studied etching in informal classes run by Harold Freedman at the Melbourne Technical College (now RMIT), simultaneous with her training in painting and drawing at the National Gallery School under its first Modernist instructor, Alan Sumner in 1946, the analytical approach taught by the Gallery School assisted her to find her simplistic, rich, and dynamic style.
Furthermore, as an avid student she undertook additional classes with George Bell at his private school, where she formed close relationships with fellow women artists Dorothy Braund and Evelyn Syme.
The Herald newspaper art reviewer 'L.T.’, surveying the year's exhibitions of 1949, associates Brash with Alan Warren, Roger Kemp, Arthur Boyd, Keith Nichol, Eric Smith, Wesley Penberthey, Samuel Fullbrook, Robert Grieve, Dorothy Braund, John Brack, Leonard French and Barbara Robertson, as "the nucleus of a new and strong movement.
[8] Also that year Stuart Purves took on the management of Australian Galleries for the next five decades and during the 1970s, included Brash in its 'stable' alongside George Baldessin, Jeffrey Smart and Brett Whiteley.
In the 1960s she adopted the new medium of silkscreen, which artists were taking up from industrial applications in which it had been used since the turn of the century, and she explored its effects of solid or translucent colour in boldly graphic abstract works, enhanced with innovations such as embossing and textured inks, as seen in her complex print of 1967 Promontory.
"[21] Another Brisbane report noted that "This lithograph exhibition — the first of its kind in Australia — has aroused considerable interest, buyers coming from as-far afield as New Zealand and Tasmania.
Particularly noteworthy is the work of Barbara Brash, Kenneth Jack and Walter Gheradin, although all 10 artists excel at individualised style arid skilful handling of their media."
Another 1954 exhibition at Peter Bray over November–December prompted Arnold Shore to comment on Brash's "more exciting colours,"[22] and though Alan McCulloch condemned the show for its ‘absence of ideas,’ he conceded "Barbara Brash's Woman Seated has the forthright quality of a vividly stencilled fabric design"[23] while Allan David in the Jewish News affirmed its "decorative" "colour and design."
Of the December show at Peter Bray of the George Bell Group the traditionalist magazine The Bulletin is typically sardonic; "Barbara Brash's Landscape with Houses is a little looser [in brushwork], as is her Old Farm, which has two trees, two wheels and a ladder, and which is easily recognisable as contemporary“[25] Nevertheless, the National Gallery of Victoria purchased one of her works from the Group's show in 1956 at Peter Bray.
[26] By 1960 the Canberra Times praised innovation; "Barbara Brash illustrates the use of overprinting in lino cut on rice paper, using many strong, transparent colours.