Category Archives: 2025
Q: You’re also known for being remarkably consistent with your blog and writing. How do you keep that rhythm? (Question from “Pastel, Passion, and Perseverance: An Interview with Barbara Rachko” in .ART Odyssey: Healing)
A page from the interview
A: It’s become habit. I started in 2012 and now I post twice a week.
On Wednesdays, I quote from a book I’m reading, paired with a photo. On Saturdays, I rotate: one week “What’s on the Easel,” another a travel photo, and twice a month a short reflection. Only two posts a month require real writing, so it’s sustainable. Consistency has been everything.
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Pearls from artists* # 684
*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 often think that we should invent another word altogether for what real artists are doing… outside of, and despite, the market, so we could divorce ourselves from what ‘Art’ has devolved into. I aspire to create a new and visionary paradigm far away from the old one. I wish all the art magazines and blogs would declare that there is no longer any money to be made or any fame to be had, so all the people who were in for the wrong reasons would simply go away.
I want artists everywhere to figure out how to tap into their own deep well, the unpredictable source inside that can keep their work fresh and alive. I hope they build confidence to consistently preserve their integrity and independence. I long for them to trust their own intuition, to keep them on their true path as their work evolves. Finally, I yearn for them to reject anything that gets in the way of actualizing their deepest voice, so they might step into that expansive space that the universe has intended for them since the day they appeared on this earth.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
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Q: What’s on the easel today?
A: I continue working on “Gatecrasher,” 58” x 38,” soft pastel on sandpaper.
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Travel photo of the month*
Ménerbes, Provence, France
*favorite travel photos that have not yet appeared in this blog
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Pearls from artists* # 676
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.
Henry James once said, ‘The great thing […] the sense of having done the best […] the sense which is the real life of the artist and the absence of which is his death, is having drawn from his own instrument the finest music that nature had hidden in it, of having played it as it should be played. He either does that or he doesn’t […]. and if he doesn’t he isn’t worth speaking of.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
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Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: I’m in the early stages of a new 58” x 38” “Bolivianos” pastel-on-sandpaper painting.
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Pearls from artists* # 675
Working
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Before, I’d never really had a taste for anything much. The things people wanted me to do left me cold. But the moment I had that paint box in my hands, I felt that this was my life. Like a cow given a sight of grass, I just headed straight into it, to the understandable despair of my father, who’d put me through other subjects. I was entranced; this was it. Here was a sort of Paradise regained, where I was completely free, alone and at peace – whereas in other things that I’d been made to do, I’d always been a bit bored and ill at ease.
For me, it was the same experience, but with soft pastel. – BR
Chatting with Henri Matisse: The Lost 1941 Interview edited by Serge Guilbaut
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Q: How do you decide when a pastel painting is finished?
“Magisterial,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58” x 38” in progress
A: During the months that it takes to create a pastel painting, I search for arresting colors that work well together. The goal is to make a painting that I have never seen before and that leads the viewer’s eyes around in interesting ways. To do this I build up and blend together as many as 25 to 30 layers of pigment. I am able to complete some areas, like the background, fairly easily – maybe with just six or seven layers of black Rembrandt pastel. The more realistic parts of a pastel painting take many more applications. In general, details always take plenty of time to refine and perfect.
No matter how many pastel layers I apply, however, I never use fixatives. It is difficult to see this in reproductions of my work, but some of the finished surfaces achieve a texture akin to velvet. My technique involves blending each layer with my fingers, pushing the pastel deep into the tooth of the sandpaper, and mixing new colors directly on the paper. Fortunately, the sandpaper holds plenty of pigment so I am able to include lots of details.
Before I pronounce a pastel painting finished, I let it sit against a wall in my studio for a few days so I can look at it later with fresh eyes. I consider a piece done when it is as good as I can make it, when adding or subtracting something would diminish what is there. Always, I try to push myself and my materials to their limits, using them in new and unexpected ways.
Comments are welcome.
Pearls from artists* # 674
Southampton, New York 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.
Everything about art requires dedication and presence. It is an intimate act, demanding the kind of sustained devotion we rarely lavish on other human beings. The artist’s generosity is highly impractical because there is no guarantee that it will ever be appreciated. Consider the level of optimism needed to repeatedly spend, even deplete, whatever reserves might be required to create the most superlative gift you could offer, one that is essentially given away to the world for free. The work we make is a love letter in a bottle, thrown into the ocean. It may or may not be read. We do not negotiate. like businesspeople, ‘You give me this, and I will give you that…’ We bequeath our pursuit of excellence and creative spirit to our audience, without reservation or qualification. We know what we have invested in it and sleep better because of it.
– Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
Comments are welcome!
Q: Do you ever use other people’s photographs as reference material for your paintings?
Some Reference Photos
A: For a number of reasons, I never use anyone else’s photographs as reference material. It seems wrong on many levels. Besides the fact that it is theft of intellectual property, it would mean I did not have the all-important experience of finding and making the photograph. Each reference photograph is the beginning of an idea for a future pastel painting. How each photograph even comes to exist – the travel and adventure behind it and the memories and stories that result – is an essential first step in my months- and even years-long creative process.
Comments are welcome!
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