Barbara Rachko's Blog, page 6

Pearls from artists* # 649

“Conundrum,” Soft Pastel on Sandpaper, 38” x 58” image, 50” x 70” 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.

Some of us spend our entire creative lives digging at the buried parts of ourselves to solve unknown mysteries that we are not even aware of. Unearthing those aspects is not an easy process, because our true psychic reality does not lie in our daily waking thoughts. It exists in the unconscious, in the form of an unfathomable, nonverbal sensory language, one that is so complex and runs so deep that we can only grasp at it, to attain small, amorphous bits. These bits can take any form, even uncharacteristic, surprising ones. We access, process, and finally transform them into what Saint Augustine called ‘visible signs of invisible realities.’

Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice”

Comments are welcome!

Q: How do you feel about the fact that more people view an artist’s work online than ever see it in person?

A page on Barbara’s website

A: This has been a dilemma for decades. Don’t get me wrong. Artists are indeed fortunate to have alternative ways to share our art, such as on the internet, but there is just no substitute for seeing art in person! I remember friends telling me about a review of a Nan Goldin exhibition that said, “All of the pleasure circuits are fired in looking.” That rarely happens when you view art online. Yet this is how most people experience our work – at a remove and on a small screen.

Nowadays, a global audience will see art on their phones instead of in our studios or in a gallery or museum. My pastel paintings are quite large and very detailed so when people finally see them in person, they are often surprised. They had gotten used to seeing them in a much smaller scale online, where very few of the meticulous and subtle details I incorporate into them are visible.

Comments are welcome!

Pearls from artists* # 648

“Apparition,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58” x 38”

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

I prefer to speak in terms of the artist’s voice. Voice is deeper, manifested from the very core of your being. It is a synthesis of the experiences, intellectual concepts, and aesthetic interests you possess, executed in your distinctive way, in the formal, emotional, and intellectual language of your chosen medium. When successful, the realization of your voice follows a gestalt principle. The combination of your ideas and the work’s physical embodiment is greater than the sum of its parts and distinguishes your outcome from everyone else’s. If we wrote down a single concept and handed it to a dozen artists, we would get very different responses from each of them, and some works would be a stronger synthesis of ideas and execution. As Frank Stella once said, “There are no good ideas for paintings, there are only good paintings… the painting IS the idea (Saltz, 2020:42).”

The art that we recognize as having singular, identifying features, those formal aspects that allow us to immediately see a work as ‘a David Wojnarowicz’ or ‘a Julie Mehretu,’ were not the product of a singular flash of brilliance. These qualities evolved as part of a sustained, life-long, ever-deepening investigation to articulate their specific and singular vision. Our voice comes from tapping into the depths of our own consciousness, then distilling the most powerful aspects of that awareness. Voice also expands and deepens over time. It evolves along with the artist.

Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice

Comments are welcome!

Q: Would you speak more about being represented by Brewster Gallery in the late 1990s?

Review of my first exhibition at Brewster Gallery

A: In 1996 I landed my first major New York gallery, Brewster Gallery.  I was still living in Virginia and Mia Kim, the director, had accepted my work on the basis of unsolicited slides mailed to the gallery in July.  The first time she saw my pastel paintings in person was when I delivered them for a solo exhibition in October.

Brewster represented Latin American masters such as Frida Kahlo, Francisco Zuniga, Diego Rivera, Francisco Toledo, and Rufino Tamayo.  Mia Kim, the director, said that she sometimes had to defend her decision to represent me.  Mia’s fabulous response was, “Barbara has the SOUL of a Latina!”  My work at that time was heavily influenced by Mexican culture.  Mia immediately understood what I was doing in my work.  How thrilled and honored I was to be represented by a gallery where my fellow sole non-Latina was Leonora Carrington!  Leonora came to my opening.

Those were wonderful days!

Comments are welcome!

Pearls from artists* # 647

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.

My life is a collage, with time cutting and rearranging the materials and laying them down, overlapping and contrasting, sometimes with the fresh shock of a surrealist painting. I wonder if traditional perspective is a necessary discipline for the art student, for over the years my life has taken on its own pattern and formed its own rules, adapting events and chronology in the sifting process of memory. As a mature artist, I can take liberties with perspective. We are not made of straight lines. As Picabia said: ‘Our heads are round so that thoughts can change direction.’

Eileen Agar in A Look at My Life

Comments are welcome!

Travel photo of the month*

Dyke Marsh, Alexandria, VA

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

Comments are welcome!

Pearls from artists* # 646

Signing “Apparition,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58” x 38”

*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 are the sum of our unique, individual life experiences. The trials we have faced, the causes we fight for, the fears that haunt us, the oddities of our minds; all of these and more become the food for our spirit. The universe does not need repetition from the past; another pretty, but pointless nude, sunlit but stale impressionist landscape, or old and cold minimalist cube. It needs you. It needs you to strip away all that clouds your genuine sense of self. It needs you to unearth and unabashedly own your messy, honest, and magnificent truth. And it needs you to deepen and shape that truth into an authentic core, one that will nourish you and your work for a lifetime.

Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice

Comments are welcome!

Q: What’s on the easel today?

A: I am just beginning a small 26” x 20” pastel on sandpaper with the tentative title, “Con Man.”

Comments are welcome!

Pearls from artists* # 645

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.

It is critical that developing voice be an intensive, holistic process. Just as we cannot simply dip our bucket into the shallow pool of our culture and emerge with any substantial yield, we cannot generate deep, meaningful work unless we cultivate a deep, meaningful life. We must enlarge and intensify our way of being in the world, even as its forces conspire to distract, numb, and dumb us down… Regardless of the situation into which we were born, we can conjure our own expansive journey, guided by altruistic ideals, as we follow our vision. Being an artist is a way to simultaneously exist on a higher plane of consciousness while moving through our brief lives on this planet.

The art world is a business system that creates and follows trends. ‘Hot topics’ generate buzz only to become stale and replaced months later. However, the process of finding voice is timeless, even though the end products evolve with time.

Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice

Comments are welcome!

Q: Does your work look different to you on days when you are sad, happy, etc.?

Barbara’s Studio

A: I am much more critical on days when I am sad so that the faults, imperfections, and things I wish I had done better stand out.  Fortunately, all of my work is framed behind plexiglas so I can’t easily go back in to touch up perceived faults.  I am reminded of the expression, “Always strive to improve, whenever possible.  It is ALWAYS possible!”  However, I’ve learned that re-working a painting is a bad idea.  You are no longer deeply involved in making it and the zeitgeist has changed.  The things you were concerned with are gone: some are forgotten, others are less urgent. 

For most artists our work is autobiography.  Art is personal.  When I look at a completed pastel painting, I usually remember exactly what was happening in my life as I created it.  Each piece is a snapshot – maybe a time capsule, if anyone could decode it – that reflects and records a particular moment.  When I finally pronounce a piece finished and sign it, that’s it, THE END.  It’s as good as I can make it at that point in time.  I’ve incorporated everything I was thinking about, what I was reading, how I was feeling, what I valued, art exhibitions I visited, programs  that I heard on the radio or watched on television, music that I listened to, what was going on in New York, in the country, and in the world.

It is still  a mystery how this heady mix finds its way into the work.  During the time that I spend on it, each particular painting teaches me everything it has to teach.  A painting requires months of looking, reacting, correcting, searching, thinking, re-thinking, revising.  Each choice is made for a reason and together these decisions dictate what the final piece looks like.  On days when I’m sad I tend to forget that.   On happier days I remember that the framed pastel paintings that you see have an inevitability to them.  If all art is the result of one’s having gone through an experience to the end, as I believe it is, then the paintings could not, and should not, look any differently.

Comments are welcome.