Barbara Rachko's Blog, page 19

Q: What makes you just want to run back to the studio and start something new?

View of Lower Manhattan

A: I always work in series, which means that one pastel painting generally leads into the next. Considerable thought and planning go into each one before I begin, so it would be rare for me to just start something new out of the blue.

Sometimes on days off from the studio when we have beautiful weather, I can can hardly wait to go outside for a walk. I grab my iPad Pro and search for new sights to photograph. After a couple of hours, I usually return home with a handful of interesting images. Photography is such a departure from the slowness of my work in the studio, considering that in a good year I make 3 or 4 pastel paintings.

Comments are welcome!

Pearls from artists* # 595

Film still from “Barbara Rachko: True Grit,” directed by Jennifer Cox, Moto Films LLC

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

One of the great paradoxes of the writing life is that our words – chosen carefully, so thoughtfully, with deep focus and concentration – those words once on the page go dead on us. Language is ours only when we are forming sentences, moving elements around, grappling with punctuation, speaking words aloud, feeling them on our lips. While we are shaping a scene into something we can hear and touch and see, that scene lives and breathes. We are inside language like painters, we are working in our medium: the tempera, the thin line, the wet oil on canvas, still in process, still alive.

But once we commit – once those words dry like paint, are affixed to the page – it becomes nearly impossible to see them. This? We think to ourselves. Our most loathsome critic emerges with a swirl of her cape. Really? What the hell is this? The sentences appear to have been written in another language – a dark dream language, tucked into some musty, inaccessible corner of our psyche. Attempting to discern its meaning is a bit like looking at our own face in the mirror. It is at once so familiar as to be invisible, and so intimate that we turn away, baffled, ashamed.

Can we ever see ourselves, really? Can we read ourselves?

It is a powerful conundrum because without the ability to see our writing afresh we cannot do the necessary work. How do we know whether a problem lies with the work, or with our inability to enter it? We need clarity, but not coldness. Openness, but not attachment. We want optimism, but that optimism must not go hand in hand with discernment. We’re not looking for a cheerleader, nor a fault-finding judge. We want to read ourselves with equanimity.

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

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Travel photo of the month*

Iquique, Chile

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

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Pearls from artists* # 594

New York City

*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 creative artist and poet and saint must fight the actual (as opposed to ideal) gods of our society – the god of conformism as well as the gods of apathy, material success, and exploitive power. These are the “idols” of our society that are worshipped by multitudes of people.

Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art

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Our 2024 Winter Newsletter!

Laurels for our new documentary, “Barbara Rachko: True Grit”!

For today I have decided to forego my usual post and instead share our 2024 Winter Newsletter! Lots of exciting things have been (and are) happening! Please check out the link.

https://mailchi.mp/d71e7ada17b3/2024winternewsletter

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Pearls from artists* # 593

Barbara’s Studio with work in progress

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

Falling in love with beauty or with someone else’s artwork that touches us is easy. We can experience the rapture of it and go home. But falling in love with our instrument or with our work is more like falling in love with a person, in that we experience the rapture and delight of the discovery, but then we are saddled with the effort of fulfillment, with love’s labors and the hard lessons in which illusions are stripped away, in which we confront difficult pieces of self-knowledge, in which we have to stretch our physical, emotional, intellectual stamina to its limits, in which our patience and our ability to persevere and transcend ourselves are tested.

Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art

Comments are welcome!

Q: What’s on the easel today?

Work in progress

A: I am working on a small, as yet untitled, pastel painting.

Comments are welcome!

Pearls from artists* # 592

The 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.

There are millions of ways of composing and structuring artwork. Each piece, whether improvised or written down, danced or painted, can evolve its own structure, its own world. The word creative comes from “to make grow,” as in the act of cultivating plants. We grow or evolve a set of rules to incorporate the unfolding of our imagination. We create new rules of progression, fresh channels in which play can flow.

Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art

Comments are welcome!

Q: Would you talk about your first solo exhibition in a commercial gallery?

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

A:  Although I had exhibited in a number of non-profit galleries in Virginia, Washington, DC, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York, my first solo in a commercial gallery was at 479 Gallery, 520 Broadway, in July 1996.  The previous summer I had entered a juried exhibition there.  My work won first prize and I was awarded a solo show the following July.

This exhibition was soon followed by representation at an important New York gallery, Brewster Fine Arts, at 41 West 57th Street.  I had my first two-person exhibition at Brewster in October 1996.  The gallery specialized in art by Latin American artists.  Besides myself, the sole non-Latina represented by Brewster was Leonora Carrington!  I quickly began exhibiting alongside a group of illustrious artists:  Leonora, Rufino Tamayo, Francisco Toledo, Francisco Zuniga, and other Latin American masters.  I could hardly believe my good fortune!   

Comments are welcome!       

Pearls from artists* # 591

In the 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.

Like lîla, or divine creativity, art is a gift, coming from a place of joy, self-discovery, inner knowing. Play, intrinsically rewarding, doesn’t cost anything. As soon as you put a price on it, it becomes, to some extent, not play. Somewhere, therefore, we each have to map out for ourselves the tricky questions of money and the artist. This is a difficult issue because artists have to eat, equip themselves, and subsidize years of professional training. Yet the marketplace shifts our art at least to some degree out of the state of free play, and may in some cases contaminate it totally. Professional athletes face the same issues. Certainly they play to a great extent for love of their sport, but issues of money, prestige, and fame introduce a lot of non play as well.

Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art

Comments are welcome!