Barbara Rachko's Blog, page 12

Pearls from artists* # 630

With “Wise One” (left) and “The Moralist”

*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

During the Victorian age, women, with their ‘smaller,’ less ‘creative’ brains, were considered incapable of becoming professional artists and were often restricted to ‘craft’ or ‘design’ (genres not considered ‘fine art’ by the establishment). This perception made it very difficult not only for women to be taken seriously as artists, but for their (and their female predecessors’) work to be sold. In order to get around this, nineteenth-century art dealers were known to scratch out a female artist’s signature and replace it with that of a male contemporary, which explains why many works by women have only just come to light. (No wonder so many of them hid self-portraits among their still lifes).

Katy Hessel in The Story of Art Without Men

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Travel photo of the month*

Chartres Cathedral, Chartres, France

*favorite travel photos that have not yet appeared in this blog

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Pearls from artists* # 629

Basquiat X Warhol Exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. Photo: Christine Marchal

*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

… scientists are right there with artists in insisting art is fundamental to being human. Art is one of our oldest creations (humans invented paint long before the wheel), one of our earliest means of communication (we drew long, long, long before we could write), and one of our most universal urges (we all engage with art, whether preschoolers, Parisians, or Paleolithic cave dwellers). I began to notice that art – or what scientists dispassionately call “human-made two- or three-dimensional structures that remain unchanged: – was everywhere: hung over the register at the hardware store, spray-painted on a bakery window, cock-eyed in a dive-bar bathroom. As humans, we’ve filled our lives with art since practically forever. The earliest known painting keeps getting older, but the last time I checked, archaeologists had traced the oldest portrait to a cave in Indonesia, where around 45,000 years ago, artists put their finishing touches on a fat figure with purple testifies for a chin. In other words, before Neanderthals went extinct, before mammoths died out, before we figured out how to harvest food or heal bloody wounds, humans applied themselves to painting a portrait of a warty pig. “It is clear that the creation of beautiful and symbolic objects is a characteristic feature of the human way of life,” wrote the biologist J.Z. Young. “They are as necessary as food or sex.”

Bianca Booker in Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See

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Q: What’s on the easel today?

A: This is a preliminary charcoal drawing for my next “Bolivianos” painting.

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Pearls from artists* # 628

Beginning

*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

We have nothing to go by, but still, we must begin. It requires chutzpah – the Yiddish word for that ineffable combination of courage and hubris – to put down one word, then another, perhaps even accumulate a couple of flimsy pages, so few that they don’t even firm the smallest of piles, and call it the beginning of a novel. Or memoir. Or story. Or anything, really rather than a couple of flimsy pages.

When I’m between books, I feel as if I will never have another story to tell. The last book has wiped me out, has taken everything from me, everything I understand and feel and know and remember, and … that’s it. There’s nothing left. A low-level depression sets in. The world hides its gifts from me. It has taken me years to realize that this feeling, the one of the well being empty, is as it should be. It means I’ve spent everything. And so I must begin again.

I wait.

I try to be patient. I remember Colette, who wrote that her most essential art was “not that of writing, but the domestic task of knowing how to wait, to conceal, to save up crumbs, to reglue, regild, change the worst into the not-so-bad, how to lose and recover in the same moment that frivolous thing, a taste for life.” Colette’s words, along with those of a few others, have migrated from one of my notebooks to another for over twenty years now. It’s wisdom I need to remember – wisdom that is easy to forget.

Dani Shapiro in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life

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Q: Would you talk about your early art exhibitions? (Question from “Culture Focus Magazine”)

Review of my first exhibition at Brewster Arts, New York City!

A: Certainly! My very first group exhibition was in a juried show in the late 1980s at the Art League Gallery in Alexandria, VA. This was a gallery that offered monthly juried shows for members. I applied regularly, had work accepted many times, and frequently won first prize for my pastel paintings. 

Early exhibitions at the Art League were followed by group and solo exhibitions at nonprofit and university spaces in Virginia, Washington, D.C., Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York; more or less up and down the mid-Atlantic states and the northeast, which were all places I could drive my truck to hand-deliver fragile pastel paintings. 

My very first solo exhibition at a commercial gallery was at 479 Gallery in SoHo (New York City) in July 1996. In 1995 I had submitted work to a juried group show and was awarded first prize, which was a solo exhibition at 479 the following year.

My exhibition with 479 Gallery was quickly followed by representation at a prestigious New York gallery, Brewster Arts Ltd., which specialized in Latin American masters such as Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, and many others. I was awarded my first two-person exhibition there in October 1996 and got to meet fellow gallery artist Leonora Carrington when she came to the opening. I could hardly believe my good fortune at gaining representation at such a revered and elegant gallery!

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Pearls from artists* # 627

In Hanga Roa, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), one of the most remote places on Earth!

*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

We cannot afford to walk sightless among miracles. Nor can we protect ourselves from suffering. We do work that thrusts us into the pulsing heart of this world, whether or not we’re on the mood, whether or not it’s difficult or painful or we’d prefer to divert our eyes. When I think of the wisest people I know, they share one defining trait: curiosity. They turn away from the minutiae of their lives – and focus on the world around them. They are motivated by a desire to explore the unfamiliar. They are drawn toward what they don’t understand. They enjoy surprise. Some of these people are seventy, eighty, close to ninety years old, but they remind me of my son and his friend on the day I sprung them from camp. Courting astonishment. Seeking breathless wonder.

Dani Shapiro in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life

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Q: How large is your collection of Mexican folk art objects?

Part of my collection

A: I began collecting these figures in the early 1990s. I haven’t counted them, but my guess is that I have amassed around 200 pieces of various sizes. This includes some Guatemalan figures. I went to Guatemala in 2009 and 2010. Since I divide my time between a house in Alexandria, VA, an apartment in Manhattan, and a studio in Chelsea, a portion of my folk art collection resides in each of these places.

Since 2017 I have been creating pastel paintings in the “Bolivianos” series, which exclusively use my photographs of Bolivian Carnival masks as source material. Occasionally, I will add one of my smaller Mexican or Guatemalan figures to improve and enrich a painting’s composition. Otherwise, my Mexican collection sits gathering dust. My thinking and my ideas, not to mention my travels, have evolved and just naturally moved on with time.

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Pearls from artists* # 626

With “Narcissist,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 28.5” x 35” framed

*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

Being an artist and a woman has never been easy. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, leading male artists – tackling five-meter-high marble sculptures and covering entire chapels with frescoes – were often termed ‘virtuosi,’ while women, simply by virtue of their gender, received neither the acclaim nor the opportunities. As time progressed, attitudes did not: it took until the end of the nineteenth century for women to be allowed to study the nude from life. Linda Nochlin has described this deprivation as though a medical student was denied the opportunity to dissect or even examine the naked human body.’ Even today, the contribution of women artists tends to be missing from history books and museum collections. It wasn’t until 1976, when feminist art historian Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris’s touring exhibition, Women Artists 1550 – 1950, opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, that women were even acknowledged as having contributed to 400 years of art. This show kick-started the scholarship, still scant, that we have on these twentieth-century artists.

Katy Hessel in The Story of Art Without Men

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Travel photo of the month*

Dinard, Brittany, France

*favorite travel photos that have not yet appeared in this blog

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