Barbara Rachko's Blog, page 20

Q: How do you deal with rejection?

Letter from MoMA to Andy Warhol

A: I take the long view and try to remember that rejection is an occupational hazard that has plagued every artist throughout history.  Even one of the most famous – Andy Warhol – had to endure innumerable rejections before his work was finally appreciated.  So why should it be any different for my peers and me?  Tacked to my refrigerator is a copy of a now classic letter, dated October 18, 1956.  It reads:

Dear Mr. Warhol,
Last week our Committee on the Museum Collections held its first meeting of the fall session and had a chance to study your drawing entitled “Shoe,” which you so generously offered as a gift to the Museum.
I regret that I must report to you that the Committee decided, after careful consideration, that they ought not to accept it for our Collections.
Let me explain that because of our severely limited gallery and storage space we must turn down many gifts offered, since we feel it is not fair to accept as a gift a work which may be shown only infrequently.
Nevertheless, the Committee has asked me to pass on to you their thanks for your generous expression in our Collection.

Sincerely,
Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
Director of the Museum Collections

P.S. The drawing may be picked up from the Museum at your convenience.

I especially chuckle at the P.S. as, surely, here we have one of the biggest blunders by a museum professional in history!

Comments are welcome!

Pearls from artists* # 590

Barbara’s Studio: when you fall in love with pastel!

*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 see again and again in the lives of special artists a profound youthful infatuation with their medium, with everything and anything connected with it – the good, the bad, the indifferent. If books have mesmerized them, they will read everything; if painting, they will frequent every gallery, running to every visiting show. They may have no idea that they are about to devote their life to that medium; they simply fell in love. The actor Len Cariou said:

“I didn’t have any thoughts about being an actor. I always was an actor. I’d go to films every Saturday. I had an insatiable appetite for films. You could see four films and a serial for half a buck. In 1959 when I read an ad in the local paper, ‘Young actors wanted for summer stock,’ all of a sudden I knew; there was a crunch in my head.”

… The artist is transported by his medium, is delighted and astonished. That his medium is able to speak to him in this way is almost a proof of the existence of god, or at least a special affirmation in the realm of the spirit.

Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and Performing Artists

Comments are welcome!

Travel photo of the month*

Newport Beach, CA

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

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Pearls from artists* # 589

Barbara’s studio… where plenty of mistakes happen!

*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 school, in the workplace, in learning an art or sport, we are taught to fear, hide or avoid mistakes. But mistakes are of incalculable value to us. There is first the value of mistakes as the raw material of learning. If we don’t make mistakes, we are unlikely to make anything at all. Tom Watson, for many years the head of IBM, said “Good judgment comes from experience. Experience cones from bad judgment.” But more important, mistakes and accidents can be the irritating grains that become pearls; they present us with unforeseen opportunities, they are fresh sources of inspiration in and of themselves. We come to regard our obstacles as ornaments, as opportunities to be exploited and explored.

Seeing and using the power of mistakes does not mean that anything goes. Practice is rooted in self-correction and refinement, working toward clearer and more reliable technique. But when a mistake occurs, we can treat it either as an invaluable piece of data about our technique or as a grain of sand around which we can make a pearl.

Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art

Comments are welcome!

Q: What’s on the easel today?

Ready to begin!

A: I’m ready to start a new 26” x 20” pastel painting that will be number 28 in the “Bolivianos” series.

Comments are welcome!

Pearls from artists* # 588

Screen shot from “Barbara Rachko: True Grit” Photo: Jennifer Cox

*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 structure of the hand is not… “just anything;” the fingers have certain characteristic relationships, certain ranges of relative movement, certain kinds of crossing, torquing, jumping, sliding, pressing, releasing movements that guide the music to come out a certain way. Graceful work uses those patterns and instinctively moves through them and out as we find ever-fresh combinations. The shape and size of the human hand brings powerful but subtle laws into every kind of art, craftsmanship, mechanical work, and into our ideas and feelings as well. There is a continuous dialogue between hand and instrument, hand and culture. Artwork is not thought up in consciousness and then, as a separate phase, executed by the hand. The hand surprises us, creates and solves problems on its own. Often enigmas that battle our brains are dealt with easily, unconsciously, by the hand.

Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art

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Start/Finish of “The Moralist,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 26” x 20”

Start

Finish

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Pearls from artists* # 587

With friends of fifty years!

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

My general preparations include everything I do to be healthy and ready for surprises, with a full palette of resources available. I need energy to acquire skill, energy to practice, energy to keep going through the inevitable setbacks, energy to keep going when things look good and I am tempted to sit back and relax. I need physical energy, intellectual energy, libidinal energy, spiritual energy. The means to tapping these energies are well known: exercise the body, eat well, sleep well, keep track of dreams, meditate, enjoy the pleasures of life, read and experience widely. When blocked, tap into the block-busters: humor, friends, and nature.

Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art

Comments are welcome!

Q: I saw your book of photos. Very nice. How do you keep track of inventory? I have struggled with that. (Question from Laura Fischer Saxon via Facebook).

Barbara’s portfolio book

A: Every time I finish a pastel painting I order an 8” x 10” c-print at Duggal Visual Solutions. I started doing this in the 1980s when I was a portrait artist and the company that represented me needed photos of my work to show to potential clients. I’ve just continued making 8” x 10”photos all these years in order to document my work!

Pastel is an extremely slow medium so even though I have been working more than 37 years, the two pastel paintings in progress now are numbers 160 and 161. The portfolio book also has early press clippings, reviews from before the internet (when everything was on paper), and a few photos of early solo exhibitions in the 1990s.

BTW what a great question! No one has ever asked me this before!

Comments are welcome!

Pearls from artists* # 586

Starting a new one!

*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 page is your mirror. What happens inside you is reflected back. You come face-to-face with your own resistance, lack of balance, self-loathing, and insatiable ego – and also with your singular vision, guts, and fortitude. No matter what you’ve achieved the day before, you begin each day at the bottom of the mountain. Isn’t this true for most of us? A surgeon about to perform a difficult operation is at the bottom of the mountain. A lawyer delivering a closing argument. An actor waiting in the wings. A teacher on the first day of school. Sometimes we may think that we’re in charge, or that we have things figured out. Life is usually right there, though, ready to knock us over when we get too sure of ourselves. Fortunately, if we have learned the lessons that years of practice have taught us, when this happens, we endure. We fail better. We sit up, dust ourselves off, and begin again.

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

Comments are welcome!