Barbara Rachko's Blog, page 17

Travel photo of the month*

Hanga Roa, Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

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

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Pearls from artists* # 605

“The Mentalist,” Soft Pastel on Sandpaper, 26” x 20” Image, 35” x 28.5” 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.

At first the concept of the unconscious was limited to denoting the state of repressed or forgotten contents. Even with Freud, who makes the unconscious – at least metaphorically – take the stage as the acting subject, it is really nothing but the gathering place of forgotten and repressed contents, and has a functional significance thanks only to these. For Freud, accordingly, the unconscious is of an exclusively personal nature, although he was aware of its archaic and mythological thought forms.

A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I call it the personal unconscious. But this personal unconscious rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the collective unconscious. I have chosen the term “collective” because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behavior that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals. It is, in other words, identical in all men and thus constitutes a common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present in every one of us.

Carl Jung in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, translated by RFC Hull

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Q: What’s on the easel today?

Work in progress

A: I’m making slow progress on “Apparition,” 58” x 38,” soft pastel on sandpaper. There is still plenty of work to be done on the details.

Comments are welcome!

Pearls from artists* # 604

“Offering,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 20″ x 26″ image, 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.

In dealing with unconscious mind, we’re dealing with an ocean full of rich, invisible life forms swimming underneath the surface. In creative work we’re trying to catch one of these fish; but we can’t kill the fish, we have to catch it in a way that brings it to life. In a sense we bring it amphibiously to the surface so it can walk around visibly; and people will recognize something familiar because they’ve got their own fish, who are cousins to your fish. Those fish, the unconscious thoughts, are not passively floating “down there;” they are moving, growing, and changing on their own, and our conscious mind is but an observer or interloper. That is why Jung calls the depths of the unconscious the “objective psyche.”

Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art

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Q: When did you begin seriously studying photography?

Catalogue from 2009 solo exhibition at HP Garcia, New York, NY

A: After I lost my husband, Bryan, on 9/11 – as I’ve discussed elsewhere, Bryan photographed most of the setups for my “Domestic Threats” series – I needed to find a way to continue making art. In June 2002 I began studying photography at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. I took a one week 4 x 5 view camera workshop because Bryan had photographed the setups with a Toyo-Omega view camera. I was surprised to discover that I had absorbed quite a bit of technical information just by watching him. Once I completed the workshop, I decided to start over from the beginning and to learn as much as I could about photography. So I enrolled in Photography I. Over the next several years I completed about a dozen courses at ICP, eventually learning to make my own large-scale chromogenic prints.

Around 2007 I began working seriously as a photographer, creating my photographic series, “Gods and Monsters,” with Bryan’s Mamiya 6 camera. In October 2009 HP Garcia Gallery in New York gave me my first solo photography exhibition.

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Pearls from artists* # 603

With friends in Alexandria, VA

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

The annals of art and science are full of studies of men and women who, desperately stuck on an enigma, have worked until they reached their wit’s end, and then suddenly made their longed-for creative leap of synthesis while doing errands or dreaming. The ripening takes place when their attention is directed elsewhere.

Insights and breakthroughs often come during periods of pause or refreshment after great labors. There is a prepatory period of accumulating data, followed by some essential but unforeseeable transformation. William James remarked in the same vein that we learn to swim in winter and skate in summer. We learn that which we do not concentrate on, the part that has been exercised and trained in the past but that is now lying fallow. Not doing can sometimes be more productive than doing.

Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art

Comments are welcome!

Q: What would you say collectors of your work have in common?

Barbara’s Studio

A: That’s a great question! I’d say that collectors of my work typically range in age from about 40 to their late 70s, they are college graduates with advanced degrees, they often don’t have kids, which is why they have disposable income and time to pursue their interests in art and culture. When I meet them (presuming my work was sold through a gallery or other third party), we usually have much to talk about – art, art history, photography, cinema, film history, dance, drama, music, travel, archaeology, Mexico, Central and South America, India, Asia – the list goes on and on.

Comments are welcome!

Pearls from artists* # 602

Barbara’s Studio

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

Anyone who studies an instrument, sport, or other art form must deal with practice, experiment, and training. We learn only by doing. There is a gigantic difference between the projects we imagine doing or plan to do and the ones we actually do. It is like the difference between a fantasied romance and one in which we really encounter another human being with all his or her complexities. Everyone knows this, yet we are inevitably taken aback by the effort and patience needed in the realization. A person may have great creative proclivities, glorious inspirations, and exalted feelings, but there is no creativity unless creations actually come into existence.

Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Art and Life

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Travel photo of the month*

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

Managua, Nicaragua, 1957; Elliott Erwitt Retrospective, le Musée Maillol, June 2023, Paris, France

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Pearls from artists* 601

Along the Seine, Paris

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

The central construct of café life in Paris introduced [Jack] Youngerman to contemporary political and cultural debates. He would take with him to New York this particular way of being alone but with people. It would infuse Coenties Slip with its unique template of influence by osmosis; the collective solitude model unique to the geographic makeup of that corner of New York. In Paris, “at any time, you can go out and be part of the city, you can see passersby, you can get out of your personal loneliness, without having to make conversation with another person. That’s something I want to do almost every day.” For Youngerman , it felt vital for art making.

Prudence Peiffer in The Slip: The New York Street that Changed American Art Forever

Comments are welcome!