Barbara Rachko's Blog, page 129

Pearls from artists* # 105

“Blind Faith,” 38″ x 58″, soft pastel on sandpaper

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

Serendipitously, I read two memoirs in close proximity, Julia Child’s account of her life in France and how she learned to be a first-rate cook, and Renee Fleming’s story of becoming a world-class opera diva.  While there were many differences between the women and the skills they set out to master, I was struck in both books by how extraordinarily hard each one worked in private for years and years before going public, certainly before becoming famous, and how each managed shame.  Both women loved what they did and thus brought to bear a similar, and I suspect key, willingness to stay with their efforts through eons of study, practice, and improvement.  Both had the ability to hear criticism and to make corrections repeatedly without becoming terminally discouraged; to bear the anxiety of their efforts; neither was too proud to learn and keep learning.  This willingness to be taught and corrected, without feeling ashamed, sometimes over and over again, is a huge asset when you are seeking to do something very well.  And one way shame impedes people is by making them take criticism too personally – as about them rather than about what they’re trying to learn.

Janna Malamud Smith in An Absorbing Errand:  How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Mastery

Comments are welcome!

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Q: What’s on the easel today?

Work in progress

A:  I am working on a large pastel-on-sandpaper painting that features two figures found in Mexico City in March – the fish-face mask and the lying dog – and an angel ceramic thing I found last year in Todos Santos, Mexico.  

Comments are welcome!

Filed under: Art Works in Progress, Black Paintings, Creative Process, Pastel Painting, Photography, Studio, Travel, Working methods Tagged: angel, ceramic, dog, easel, figures, fish-face, lying, mask, Mexico, Mexico City, pastel-on-sandpaper painting, today, Todos Santos

Pearls from artists* # 104

View of Roden Crater

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

As the art historian Jack Flam has noted:  ‘Art constantly reinvents itself.  As time passes, new audiences find new ideas and inspiration in it and keep reframing its meanings and significance in fresh ways.  Art also encourages new mental attitudes and ways of looking as it travels across space; some of these attitudes and beliefs might have been inconceivable to the people who created it, but the art nonetheless manages to speak persuasively and to create fresh images in other collective imaginations.’

Quoted in Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens by Wendy A. Grossman

Comments are welcome!

 

 

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Q: You have been a working artist for nearly thirty years. Considering your entire body of work, is there any particular painting that you love or hate?

Barbara’s studio

A:  With very few exceptions, I generally love all of my paintings equally.  I do not hate any of them.  Each was the best I could make at that particular stage in my development as an artist and as a person.  I am a perfectionist with high standards – this is my life’s work.  I am devoted to becoming the best artist I can be.   I have never pronounced a work “finished” until it is the absolute best that I can make.  

Comments are welcome!

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Pearls from artists* # 103

Quemado, NM

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

There are times when the art-maker’s solitude feels mildly pleasant, or deeply pleasurable, or even blissful.  Many people refer to Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow” as their experience of art-making – that state of being in which one is focused and concentrated, removed from time, energized, and not lonely at all.  But flow happens most readily when the task is not too frustrating, and when the obstacles feel manageable.  I feel flow more readily when the writing is going well than when I’m trying to wrangle with some thorny bit of it.  Then I feel unflow and, sometimes, too alone with the labor and very glad to have fond people close at hand in my life and in my memory.

Janna Malamud Smith in An Absorbing Errand:  How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Mastery

Comments are welcome!      

 

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Q: What is the reality of the art world today? Do people experience it enough?

West 29th Street studio

A:   I cannot comment on the art world today or the experience of other people.  I can only speak for myself.  I am completely devoted to my work; my entire life revolves around art.  When I’m not in my studio creating, I am reading about art, thinking about it, gaining inspiration from other artists and from artistic travel, working out new ideas, going to museum and gallery exhibitions, trying to understand the business side of things, etc.   Art is a calling and I personally experience it enough as my work continues to evolve! 

Comments are welcome! 

 

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Pearls from artists* # 102

New York, NY

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

That a photograph is unlikely to be a laboratory record is evident when we think about how it is made.  Most photographers are people of immense enthusiasms whose work involves many choices – to brake the car, grab the yellow instead of the green filter, wait out the cloud, and at the second everything looks inexplicably right, to release the shutter.  Behind these decisions stands the photographer’s individual framework of recollections and meditations about the way he perceived that place or places like it before.  Without such a background there would be no knowing whether the scene on the ground glass was characteristic of the geography and of his experience of it and intuition of it – in short, whether it was true.

Making photographs has to be, then, a personal matter; when it is not, the results are not persuasive.  Only the artist’s presence in the work can convince us that its affirmation resulted from and has been tested by human experience.  Without the photographer in the photograph the view is no more compelling than the product of some annoying record camera, a machine perhaps capable of happy accident but not response to form.

Beauty in Photography by Robert Adams

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Q: What are your most significant professional accomplishments to date?

“Big Deal,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58″ x 38″

A:  I will mention these:  my 1996 solo exhibition at a venerable New York gallery that specialized in Latin American-influenced art, Brewster Arts Ltd. at 41 West 57th Street; completion of Aljira’s Emerge 2000 business program for professional artists; and a solo exhibition at the Walton Art Center in Fayetteville, AR, in 2005.  All three were very important factors in my artistic and professional development.

In January I published my first eBook, From Pilot to Painter, on Amazon.

In February I was interviewed by Brainard Carey for his Yale University Radio program.  It can be heard at

http://museumofnonvisibleart.com/interviews/barbara-rachko/

Most recently I was interviewed for a fourteen-page article (the longest they have ever published on a single artist!) in ARTiculAction Art Review .  Please see

http://issuu.com/articulaction/docs/articulaction_art_review_-_july_201/30

Comments are welcome!

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Pearls from artists* # 101

 

Teleidoscope

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

Everything you do in life informs your work.  You walk around thinking about it all the time, dreaming about it.  It’s just there.  At a certain point it simply doesn’t go away.

Joanne Akalitis quoted in Anne Bogart’s Conversations with Anne:  Twenty-four Interviews 

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Q: How long does it take you to complete a pastel-on-sandpaper painting?

Barbara’s studio

A:  Mine is a slow and labor-intensive process.  First, there is foreign travel to find the cultural objects – masks, carved wooden animals, paper mâché figures, and toys – that are my subject matter.  If they are heavy I ship them home.  

Next comes planning exactly how to photograph them, lighting and setting everything up, and shooting a roll of 220 film with my Mamiya 6 camera.  I still like to use an analog camera for my fine art work, although I am rethinking this.  I have the film developed, decide which image to use, and order a 20” x 24” reference photograph from Manhattan Photo on West 20th Street.  

Then I am ready to start.  I work on each pastel-on-sandpaper painting for approximately three months.  I am in my studio 7 to 8 hours a day, five days a week.  During that time I make thousands of creative decisions as I apply and layer soft pastels (I have 8 tables-worth to choose from!), blend them with my fingers, and mix new colors directly on the sandpaper.  A finished piece consists of up to 30 layers of soft pastel.  My self-invented technique accounts for the vivid, intense color that often leads viewers of my originals to look very closely and ask, “What medium is this?”  I believe I am pushing soft pastel to its limits, using it in ways that no other artist has done.

Comments are welcome!

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