Category Archives: 2014
2014 Archive
Q: How do you feel about accepting commissions?
“Reunion,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″, 1990
A: By the time I left the Navy in 1989 to devote myself to making art, I had begun a career as a portrait painter. I needed to make money, this was the only way I could think of to do so, and I had perfected the craft of creating photo-realistic portraits in pastel. It worked for a little while.
A year later I found myself feeling bored and frustrated for many reasons. I didn’t like having to please a client because their concerns generally had little to do with art. Once I ensured that the portrait was a good (and usually flattering) likeness, there was no more room for experimentation, growth, or creativity. I believed (and still do) that I could never learn all there was to know about soft pastel. I wanted to explore color and composition and take this under-appreciated medium as far as possible. It seemed likely that painting portraits would not allow me to accomplish this. Also, I tended to underestimate the amount of time needed to make a portrait and charged too small a fee.
So I decided commissioned portraits were not for me and made the last one in 1990 (above). I feel fortunate to have the freedom to create work that does not answer to external concerns.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 79
Negombo, Sri Lanka
* 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’s to say? Great paintings – people flock to see them, they draw crowds, they’re reproduced endlessly on coffee mugs and mouse pads and anything-you-like. And, I count myself in the following, you can have a lifetime of perfectly sincere museum-going where you traipse around enjoying everything and then go out and have some lunch. But … if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don’t think, ‘oh, I love this picture because it’s universal.’ ‘I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.’ That’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey, kid. Yes, you.” Fingertip gliding over the faded-out photo – the conservator’s touch, a-touch-without-touching, a communion wafer’s space between the surface and his forefinger. “An individual heart-shock. Your dream … Vermeer’s dream. You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still, the lady buying the greeting card at the museum shop sees something else entire, and that’s not even to mention the people separated from us by time – four hundred years before us, four hundred years after we’re gone – it’ll never strike anybody the same way and the great majority of people it’ll never strike in any deep way at all – a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and particular. Yours, yours. I was painted for you… fateful objects. Every dealer and antiquaire recognizes them. The pieces that occur and recur. Maybe for someone else, not a dealer, it wouldn’t be an object. It’d be a city, a color, a time of day. The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag.”
Donna Tartt in The Goldfinch
Comments are welcome!
Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: I continue to work on a pastel-on-sandpaper painting that I began some weeks ago. For now the working title is “Blinded,” which relates to the maroon and black shape on the main figure’s right eye. I haven’t yet figured out the deeper meaning of that shape.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 78
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.
To me, openings are never what you want them to be. The excitement, relief, anxiety, and anticipation are too much to process. There’s no apotheosis, no pinnacle, no turning point. It’s not like theater, where at the end of a performance people get up and applaud.
Nothing gets created at an opening. Nothing of artistic merit takes place. All of that important stuff happens in the studio, long before the exhibition, when you’re alone. For me, anyway, openings are something to get through, an ordeal to be endured. The bigger the event, the less I remember it. I pretty much walk in, and wherever I stop is where I stay. I paint a grin on my face so fixed that by the end of the evening my jaw is sore. I remember none of the conversations. I stand there shaking hands, blindly mouthing, “Thank you. Thank you very much.” Then eventually April [Gornick, Fischl’s wife] collects me and we leave.
If, on the other hand, you were to ask me what I remember about making the paintings in a show, that’s a different story. Imagine touching something, stroking it, jostling it, caressing it, and as you’re doing this, you are creating it. How you touched it is how it came into existence. Unlike other pleasures, where the feelings fade quickly as details become blurred, with paintings you remember everything. Within the details are all the bumps and the friction, the memory of when the creative instinct flowed, when you were distracted or lazy or working too hard. It’s all there on the canvas. When I look at my paintings again, years later, even, I remember it all – the victory laps and the scars.
Eric Fischl and Michael Stone in Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas
Comments are welcome!
Q: Where do you want your work to go in the future?
Barbara’s studio
A: Recently I answered a question about why I create, but now that I think about it, the same answer applies to what I want to do as an artist in the future:
~ to create bold and vibrant pastel paintings and photographs that have never existed before
~ to continue to push my primary medium – soft pastel on sandpaper – as far as I can and to use it in more innovative ways
~ to create opportunities for artistic dialogue with people who understand and value the work to which I am devoting my life
The last has always been the toughest. I sometimes think of myself as Sisyphus because expanding the audience for my art is an ongoing uphill battle. Many artist friends tell me they feel the same way about building their audience. It’s one of the most difficult tasks that we have to do as artists. I heard Annie Leibovitz interviewed on the radio once and remember her saying that after 40 years as a photographer, everything just gets richer. Notice that she didn’t say it gets any easier; she said, “it just gets richer.” I have been a painter for nearly 30 years and a photographer for 11. I agree completely. All artists have to go wherever our work goes. Creating art and watching the process evolve is an endlessly fascinating intellectual journey. I wouldn’t want to be spending my time on earth doing anything else!
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 77
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.
Current possibilities far exceed any single artist’s capacity to engage them. Indeed, every known way of making art ever undertaken in all of history is included in today’s inventory of creative options. Thus, choices must be made. This has had a profound effect upon the quantity and diversity of skills needed to become an artist today. In addition to such conventional forms of artistic talent as visual acuity, manual dexterity, sensitivity, intelligence, ingenuity, and perseverance, contemporary artists must also be able to make judicious choices from a limitless inventory of alternatives. A decisive aspect of the creative act involves choosing a place amid possibilities that are as bountiful as they are eclectic and chaotic. Even this process entail choices. In staking the territory they wish to occupy, artists may be gluttons or ascetics, connoisseurs or commoners. Relationships between artists and their career choices may be lifelong and monogamous, or sequentially monogamous, polygamous, or promiscuous. But artists’ options even exceed selecting precedents. Free access to the past is amplified by freedom to augment the catalogue of creative options by contributing something new.
In the Making: Creative Options for Contemporary Art by Linda Weintraub
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Q: What impact do you hope to have on viewers of your work?
“Us and Them,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 47″ x 38″, 1993
A: I am pushing soft pastel to its limits, using it in ways that no artist has done before. I want people to see what is possible to accomplish with this medium. Because I have experienced unspeakable heartache – the loss of my husband on 9/11, onboard the high-jacked airplane that crashed into the Pentagon – when viewers learn about my life story, I hope to serve as an inspiration to keep forging ahead regardless of what tragedies life may bring. These are the main reasons that I wrote my eBook.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 76
Cabo San Lucas, Mexico
* 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 stops us in our tracks? I am rarely stopped by something or someone I can instantly know. In fact, I have always been attracted to the challenge of getting to know what I cannot instantly categorize or dismiss, whether an actor’s presence, a painting, a piece of music, or a personal relationship. It is the journey towards the object of attraction that interests me. We stand in relation to one another. We long for the relationships that will change our vistas. Attraction is an invitation to an evanescent journey, to a new way of experiencing life or perceiving reality.
An authentic work of art embodies intense energy. It demands response. You can either avoid it, shut it out, or meet it and tussle. It contains attractive and complicated energy fields and a logic all its own. It does not create desire or movement in the receiver, rather it engenders what James Joyce labeled ‘aesthetic arrest.’ You are stopped in your tracks. You cannot easily walk by it and go on with your life. You find yourself in relation to something that you cannot readily dismiss.
Anne Bogart in A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theater
Comments are welcome!
Q: Was there a defining moment, meeting, or event that convinced you to pursue an artistic life?
West 29th Street studio
A: There was not a defining moment per se, but looking back now, I’d say that because the Navy assigned me to a series of boring office jobs instead of letting me fly, I became determined to find a vocation infinitely more rewarding and more interesting to devote the rest of my life to. I came to this realization over time, rather than in a single moment.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 75
Half Dome at Yosemite
* 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 realize now that our common human language is not Esperanto or computers or something having to do with vocal cords and speech. It is, rather, our sense of proportion, our balance, harmony and other aspects of simple and fundamental form. Our universal language, in other words, is beauty.
Rollo May, My Quest for Beauty
Comments are welcome!
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