Barbara Rachko's Blog, page 7

Pearls from artists* # 644

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.

Making the work you were born to make is a radical act of resistance in the current social climate. It refuses to hold money or power as its highest value. It takes as much time as it needs. It demands quiet and stillness. It involves deep reflection and reverence. It prioritizes uncool traits of curiosity, wonder, and earnestness. It shuns the superficial, contorting to reach far beyond it for the significant. It answers to no one but itself and has not been diluted by corporate committee. It doesn’t pander. It can tell stories that make people uncomfortable. And, despite all attempts to frame it as such, unlike most other activities, art is not a competitive sport.

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

Comments are welcome!

Q: Why do you have so many pastels?

Barbara’s Studio

A: Our eyes can see infinitely more colors than the relative few that are made into pastels. When I layer pigments onto the sandpaper substrate, I mix new colors directly on the painting. This has the result of making many of my colors unrepeatable. The short answer is, I need lots of pastels so that I can mix new colors.

I have been working exclusively with soft pastel for nearly 40 years. Each pastel stick has unique mixing properties that depend on what was used as a binder to hold the dry pigment together. Some soft pastels are oily, some are buttery, some are powdery, some crumble easily, some are harder.  Each one feels slightly different when I apply it to the sandpaper.

Soft pastel is distinct among paint media. Oil painters need only a few tubes of paint to make any number of colors, but pastels are not easily combined to form new colors. I learned how to mix colors by experimenting. In the process I developed a personal and unique science of color-mixing and blending. This is one of the factors that makes my work so recognizable and sets it apart from that of other pastel painters.

Comments are welcome.

Pearls from artists* # 643

Sunset over Jersey 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.

What the really great artists do is they’re entirely themselves. They’re entirely themselves, they’ve got their own visions, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it’s authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.

David Foster Wallace quoted in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice by Kate Kretz

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Travel photo of the month*

On the ferry to Naoshima Island, Japan

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

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Pearls from artists* # 642

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.

Radical changes in our culture threaten to undermine the potency of art and artists alike. Disparate forces conspire to lower the bar for how we expect art to function. As decades go by, we are educating and evolving to value left-brain strengths over holistic right-brain thought, with disastrous consequences for humanity… Deep contemplation has been hijacked by addictive technology. Rising authoritarianism strives to squash dissenting and diverse voices, as well as historical truths and critical thinking skills. Social media approval affects the art that is produced, shared, and validated. Easily digested work is promoted, while the most compelling work (the kind that could transform the trajectory of art, or affect real social change) is left behind. Critics are coining terms like ‘Zombie Formalism’ … and ‘Zombie Figuration’ … in response to the sterility and stultifying sameness of much contemporary work. It’s as if artists were absorbing online algorithms into their bloodstreams. This empty, safe sensibility riffs and rehashes a vacuous culture, generating a perpetual cycle of well-branded insignificance.

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

Comments are welcome!

Q: What’s on the easel today?

Charcoal Drawing

A: This is a preliminary charcoal drawing to help plan my next small “Bolivianos” painting.

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Pearls from artists* # 641

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.

Artistic voice is the most critical aspect of creative practice, yet it is rarely taught…

Some schools teach ‘ideation’ (conceptualizing a work or series), but that is very different from cultivating an essential core that is uniquely your own. Ideation is a Band-Aid to get you through your next few projects, while voice is a consistent, profound, and idiosyncratic wellspring that you own. It is born of your singular fascinations, obsessions, and life experiences, both weighty and mundane. If you make the effort to build and consistently replenish it, this well will deepen, yielding creative riches over the course of your entire life. Cultivating visual voice needs to be a cornerstone of art education, not an afterthought.

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

Comments are welcome!

Start/Finish of “Apparition,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58” x 38” image, 70” x 50” framed

Start

Finish

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Pearls from artists* # 640

“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.

When an artist changes and develops over the years, as is natural to any creative person, such change is met by howls of protest from the marketers. Sometimes an artist (or teacher, scientist, or spiritual guru) starts with something extraordinary, becomes a star, and then their gift is either frozen or perverted.

The growing and risky edge of creative work is devalued, treated as a frill or extracurricular activity decorating the routine of ordinary life. There are few mechanisms available for the artist to construct a self-sustaining way of living and working. “One gathers,” says Virginia Woolf,

“from the enormous modern literature of confession and self-analysis that to write a book of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer’s mind whole and entire. Generally, material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down. Further, accentuating all these difficulties and making them harder to bear is the world’s notorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them. It does not care whether Flaubert finds the right word or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this or that fact. Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not want. And so the writer, Keats, Flaubert, Carlyle, suffers, especially in the creative years of youth, every form of distraction and discouragement. A curse, a cry of agony, rises from those books of analysis and confession. “Mighty poems in their misery dead” – that is the burden of their song. If anything comes through in spite of all this, it is a miracle, and probably no book is born entire and uncrippled as it was conceived.”

Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Art and Life

Comments are welcome!

Q: Why art? (Question from “Arts Illustrated”)

In the Studio

A: I love this question!  I remember being impressed by Ursula von Rydingsvard’s exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts a few years ago.  What stayed with me most was her wall text, “Why Do I Make Art by Ursula von Rydingsvard.”  There she listed two dozen benefits that art-making has brought to her life.

I want to share some of my own personal reasons for art-making here, in no particular order.  My list keeps changing, but these are true at least for today. 

1.   Because I love the entire years-long creative process – from foreign travel whereby I discover new source material, to deciding what I will make, to the months spent in the studio realizing my ideas, to packing up my newest pastel painting and bringing it to my Virginia framer’s shop, to seeing the framed piece hanging on a collector’s wall, to staying in touch with collectors over the years and learning how their relationship to the work changes.

2.   Because I love walking into my studio in the morning and seeing all of that color!  No matter what mood I am in, my spirit is immediately uplifted.  

3.   Because my studio is my favorite place to be… in the entire world.  I’d say that it is my most precious creation.  It’s taken more than twenty-two years to get it this way.  I hope I never have to move!

4.   Because I get to listen to my favorite music all day.

5.   Because when I am working in the studio, if I want, I can tune out the world and all of its urgent problems.  The same goes for whatever personal problems I am experiencing.

6.   Because I am devoted to my medium.  How I use pastel continually evolves.  It’s exciting to keep learning about its properties and to see what new techniques will develop.

7.   Because I have been given certain gifts and abilities and that entails a sacred obligation to USE them.  I could not live with myself were I to do otherwise.

8.   Because art-making gives meaning and purpose to my life.  I never wake up in the morning wondering, how should I spend the day?  I have important work to do and a place to do it.  I know this is how I am supposed to be spending my time on earth.

9.   Because I have an enviable commute.  To get to my studio it’s a thirty-minute walk, often on the High Line early in the morning before throngs of tourists have arrived.

10.  Because life as an artist is never easy.  It’s a continual challenge to keep forging ahead, but the effort is also never boring.  

11.  Because each day in the studio is different from all the rest. 

12.  Because I love the physicality of it.  I stand all day.  I’m always moving and staying fit.

13.  Because I have always been a thinker more than a talker.  I enjoy and crave solitude.  I am often reminded of the expression, “She who travels the farthest, travels alone.”  In my work I travel anywhere.

14.  Because spending so much solitary time helps me understand what I think and feel and to reflect on the twists and turns of my unexpected and fascinating life.

15.  Because I learn about the world.  I read and do research that gets incorporated into the work.

16.  Because I get to make all the rules.  I set the challenges and the goals, then decide what is succeeding and what isn’t.  It is working life at its most free.

17.  Because I enjoy figuring things out for myself instead of being told what to do or how to think.

18.  Because despite enormous obstacles, I am still able to do it.  Art-making has been the focus of my life for thirty-nine years – I was a late bloomer – and I intend to continue as long as possible.

19.  Because I have been through tremendous tragedy and deserve to spend the rest of my life doing exactly what I love.  The art world has not caught up as much as I would like yet, but so be it.  This is my passion and my life’s work and nothing will change that.

20.  Because thanks to the internet and via social media, my work can be seen in places I have never been to and probably will never go.

21.  Because I would like to be remembered.  The idea of leaving art behind for future generations to appreciate and enjoy is appealing.

Comments are welcome!