Category Archives: 2023
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!
Pearls from artists* # 585
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Improvisation, composition, writing, painting, theater, invention, all creative acts are forms of play, the starting place of creativity in the human growth cycle, and one of the great primal life functions. Without play, learning and evolution are impossible. Play is the taproot from which original art springs; it is the raw stuff that the artist channels and organizes with all his learning and technique. Technique itself springs from play, because we can acquire technique only by the practice of practice, by persistently experimenting and playing with our tools and testing their limits and resistances. Creative work is play; it is free speculation using the materials of one’s chosen form. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves. Artists play with color and space. Musicians play with sound and silence. Eros plays with lovers. Gods play with the universe. Children play with everything they can get their hands on.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 584
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 creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves.
Carl Jung quoted by Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
Comments are welcome!
Q: When you’re not creating art what’s your next favorite creative activity?
Hudson Yards, NYC iPad Photo
A: I love taking photographs with my iPad Pro! It has a 12.9″ screen so I can see every detail of the image. It is equivalent to using an 8 x 10 view camera with the advantages of being relatively lightweight and portable; does not require a tripod, a hood, or other special equipment like individual film holders; and the image appears right side up on the screen. It’s a perfect camera!
I have owned and used many film and digital cameras, but my iPad Pro has been my favorite for several years now. It’s great for my specific needs. I take it all over the world!
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 583
In the Studio Photo: Susan Erlichman
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Let’s return to Michelangelo’s idea of removing apparent surfaces to reveal or liberate the statue that has been buried in the stone since the beginning of time. Michelangelo claimed that he was guided by a faculty he called intelleto. Intelleto is intelligence, not of the merely rational kind, but visionary intelligence, a deep seeing of the underlying pattern beneath appearances. Here the artist is, as it were, an archaeologist, uncovering deeper and deeper strata as he works, recovering not an ancient civilization but something as yet unborn, unseen, unheard except by the inner eye, the inner ear. He is not just removing apparent surfaces from some external object, he is removing apparent surfaces from the Self, revealing his original nature.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
Comments are welcome!
Q: With so many soft pastels to choose from, do you have a way of organizing them so that you can find the color you need?
Barbara’s Studio
A: The arrangement of my pastels evolved organically. I keep them in their original trays. My oldest pastel sets are closer to the easel and the newest ones are the furthest away. After 37 years of experience working in pastel, I am well-acquainted with their individual properties. I know exactly where to find each color based on which manufacturer makes it.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 582
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Strange, but the artist has never made a fuss about being denied those estimable virtues other men would not do without: intellectuality, good judgment, a knowledge of the world, and rational conduct. It may be charged, that he has even fostered the myth. In his intimate journals Vollard tells us that Degas feigned deafness to escape disputations and harangues concerning things he considered false and distasteful. If the speaker or subject changed, his hearing immediately improved. We must marvel at his wisdom since he must have only surmised what we know definitely today: tThat the constant repetition of falsehood is more convincing than the demonstration of truth. It is understandable, then, how the artist might actually cultivate this moronic appearance, this deafness, this inarticulateness, in an effort to evade the million irrelevancies which daily accumulate concerning his work. For, while the authority of the doctor or plumber is never questioned, everyone deems himself a good judge and an adequate arbiter of what a work of art should be and how it should be done.
Mark Rothko in The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art, edited by Christopher Rothko
Comments are welcome!
Travel photo of the month*
*favorite travel photos that have not yet appeared in this blog
Jennifer Cox, Director, and I on the red carpet at the World Premier of “Barbara Rachko: True Grit” on Oct. 13, 2023 during the Newport Beach Film Festival!
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 581
With recent “Bolivianos”
*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 essence of style is this: We have something in us, about us; it can be called many things, but for now let’s call it our original nature. We are born with our original nature, but on top of that, as we grow up, we accommodate to the patterns and habits of our culture, family, physical environment, and the daily business of the life we have taken on. What we are taught solidifies as “reality.” Our persona, the mask we show the world, develops out of our experience and training, step by step from infancy to adulthood. We construct our world through the actions of perception, learning, and expectation. We construct our “self” through the same actions of perception, learning, and expectation. World and self interlock and match each other, step by step and shape by shape. If the two constructions, self and world, mesh, we grow from child to adult becoming “normally adjusted individuals.” If they do not mesh so well, we may experience feelings of inner division, loneliness, or alienation.
If we should happen to become artists, our work takes on, to a certain extent, the style of the time: the clothing in which we are dressed by our generation, our country and language, our surroundings, the people who have influenced us.
But somehow, even when we are grown up and “adjusted,” everything we do and are – our handwriting, the vibrato of our voice, the way we handle the bow or breathe into the instrument, our way of using language, the look in our eyes, the pattern of whirling fingerprints on our hand – all these things are symptomatic of our original nature. They all show the imprint of our own deeper style or character.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
Comments are welcome!
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