Pearls from artists* # 726
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
The first thing painters ask about a studio-space usually concerns the light. And so one might think of a studio as a kind of conservatory or observatory or even a lighthouse. And of course light is important. But it seems to me that a studio, when being used, is much more like a stomach. A place of digestion, transformation, and excretion. Where images change form. Where everything is both regular and unpredictable.
John Berger quoted in The Art Life: On Creativity and Career by Stuart Horodner
Comments are welcome!
Q: Do you use air filters in your studio?
Pastel detritus
A: No, but I wear a surgical mask when I work, to prevent accidentally breathing the pastel dust. Also, I apply a barrier cream, called Artgard, to my hands to prevent pigment being absorbed into my skin through any cuts I might have. I take care that my head is always higher than my hand as I work, so the dust falls below my mouth and nose.
It may be hard to tell from the photo but my easel is tilted forward, allowing pastel dust to fall onto the easel and floor. I am well aware of the toxicity of pastel and believe I take the proper precautions. After forty years working with soft pastel, so far I’ve managed to stay healthy.
Comments are welcome.
Pearls from artists* # 725
New York sunset
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on
Mira Schor
To survive in the long run, to continue to function, someone ought to tell you that there is a long run. To survive, it is necessary to stand for something within yourself and always doubt your own deepest beliefs. It is necessary to have the agglomeration of terrors and hopes, delights and doubts that make up a soul. Perhaps a soul is culturally bound and determined, but it can be more than a slave to fashion. Trends are fleeting. A lifetime of art cannot be built on a weathervane.
Quoted in The Art Life: On Creativity and Career by Stuart Horodner
Comments are welcome!
Q: Why do you always work in series?
A: I don’t really have any choice in the matter. It’s more or less the way I have always worked so it feels natural for my creative output to unfold in series.
Art-making comes from a deep place. It’s a way of making one’s time on earth matter. Working in series mimics the more or less gradual way that our lives happen, the way we slowly evolve and change over the years. Life-altering, “A-Ha” moments happen, certainly, but seldom do we wake up drastically different – in thinking, in behavior, etc. – from what we were the day before.
Working in series feels authentic. It helps me eke out every lesson my pastel paintings have to teach. With each completed piece, my ideas and my creative process are able to progress a step or two further.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 724
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on
Hokusai
From the age of six, I had a passion for drawing the form of objects. By the age of about fifty, I had published an infinity of drawings, but nothing I produced before the age of seventy is worth counting. It was at the age of seventy-three that I more or less understood the structure of true nature, of animals, grasses, birds, fish, and insects.
Consequently, by the age of eighty, I will have made even more progress; at ninety I will penetrate the mystery of things; at a hundred I will definitely have reached a degree of wonder, and when I am a hundred and ten, for my part, be it a dot, be it a line, everything will be alive.
I ask those who will live as long as I do to see if I keep my word.
Written at the age of seventy-five by myself, formerly Hokusai, today Gwakio Rogin, the old man crazy about drawing.
Stuart Horodner in The Art Life: On Creativity and Career
Comments are welcome!
Travel photo of the month*
El Alto, Bolivia
*favorite travel photos that have not yet appeared in this blog
At 13,500’ altitude in the Andes you can see forever!
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 723
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on
Francis Bacon Interview with David Sylvester
DS: You really are not working with any thought of an audience?
FB: I’m working for myself; what else have I got to work for? How can I work for an audience? What do you imagine that an audience would want? I have got nobody to excite except myself, so I am always surprised if anybody else likes my work sometimes. I suppose I’m very lucky, of course, to be able to earn my living by something that really absorbs me to try and do, if that’s what you call luck.
Stuart Horodner in The Art Life: On Creativity and Career
Comments are welcome!
Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: I continue working on “Strongman,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58” x 38.” This is the second “Bolivianos” painting I am creating based on photos from my February trip to Bolivia to research Carnival.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 722
Barbara attending Carnival in Oruro, Bolivia!
*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 most insidious kinds of pressure to which an artist can succumb is the pressure to be accessible. Well-meaning advisors may tell you that x is acceptable, marketable, popular and wealthy. But if you alter your work to be more x-ish, people will spot it as inauthentic; it will not be heartfelt because it does not originate in your own being. By all means develop and revise your work to communicate more and more clearly; but if you alter one word in order to please some imagined market “out there,” the integrity and originality of everything you do is at risk. You get off the sure base of what you really know and are. Whereas if you create your own material in your own way, developing art work that is more and more authentically yours, people will spot it as genuine. In resisting the temptation to accessibility, you are creating a genuine space and living in it.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
Comments are welcome!
Q: What stands out from your experiences in India? (Question from “Pastel, Passion, and Perseverance: An Interview with Barbara Rachko” in .ART Odyssey: Healing)
Ahmedabad – Danapith, India
A: The chaos of the cities. The constant honking, the traffic, the sheer density. I used to think New York was crazy until I went to Delhi and Mumbai—then I came home and New York felt peaceful. But visually, India is extraordinary: the clothing, the buildings, the surprises. Once I was in a bus at a traffic light and saw the back end of an elephant sticking out of a pickup truck.
You never forget things like that. They’re unique to a place.
Comments are welcome!
