Category Archives: Creative Process
Q: What’s on the easel today?
Pastel painting in progress
A: Here is the latest progress on “Showman,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 26” x 20”.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 648
“Apparition,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58” x 38”
*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 prefer to speak in terms of the artist’s voice. Voice is deeper, manifested from the very core of your being. It is a synthesis of the experiences, intellectual concepts, and aesthetic interests you possess, executed in your distinctive way, in the formal, emotional, and intellectual language of your chosen medium. When successful, the realization of your voice follows a gestalt principle. The combination of your ideas and the work’s physical embodiment is greater than the sum of its parts and distinguishes your outcome from everyone else’s. If we wrote down a single concept and handed it to a dozen artists, we would get very different responses from each of them, and some works would be a stronger synthesis of ideas and execution. As Frank Stella once said, “There are no good ideas for paintings, there are only good paintings… the painting IS the idea (Saltz, 2020:42).”
The art that we recognize as having singular, identifying features, those formal aspects that allow us to immediately see a work as ‘a David Wojnarowicz’ or ‘a Julie Mehretu,’ were not the product of a singular flash of brilliance. These qualities evolved as part of a sustained, life-long, ever-deepening investigation to articulate their specific and singular vision. Our voice comes from tapping into the depths of our own consciousness, then distilling the most powerful aspects of that awareness. Voice also expands and deepens over time. It evolves along with the artist.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
Comments are welcome!
Q: What’s on the easel today?
A: I am just beginning a small 26” x 20” pastel on sandpaper with the tentative title, “Con Man.”
Comments are welcome!
Q: Does your work look different to you on days when you are sad, happy, etc.?
Barbara’s Studio
A: I am much more critical on days when I am sad so that the faults, imperfections, and things I wish I had done better stand out. Fortunately, all of my work is framed behind plexiglas so I can’t easily go back in to touch up perceived faults. I am reminded of the expression, “Always strive to improve, whenever possible. It is ALWAYS possible!” However, I’ve learned that re-working a painting is a bad idea. You are no longer deeply involved in making it and the zeitgeist has changed. The things you were concerned with are gone: some are forgotten, others are less urgent.
For most artists our work is autobiography. Art is personal. When I look at a completed pastel painting, I usually remember exactly what was happening in my life as I created it. Each piece is a snapshot – maybe a time capsule, if anyone could decode it – that reflects and records a particular moment. When I finally pronounce a piece finished and sign it, that’s it, THE END. It’s as good as I can make it at that point in time. I’ve incorporated everything I was thinking about, what I was reading, how I was feeling, what I valued, art exhibitions I visited, programs that I heard on the radio or watched on television, music that I listened to, what was going on in New York, in the country, and in the world.
It is still a mystery how this heady mix finds its way into the work. During the time that I spend on it, each particular painting teaches me everything it has to teach. A painting requires months of looking, reacting, correcting, searching, thinking, re-thinking, revising. Each choice is made for a reason and together these decisions dictate what the final piece looks like. On days when I’m sad I tend to forget that. On happier days I remember that the framed pastel paintings that you see have an inevitability to them. If all art is the result of one’s having gone through an experience to the end, as I believe it is, then the paintings could not, and should not, look any differently.
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.
Q: What’s on the easel today?
Charcoal Drawing
A: This is a preliminary charcoal drawing to help plan my next small “Bolivianos” painting.
Comments are welcome!
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
Comments are welcome!
Q: What’s on the easel today?
A: I continue making slow progress on “Oblate,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 26” x 20.”
Comments are welcome!
Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: I continue working on “Oblate,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 26” x 20”. I often say that titles can come from anywhere and here is a great example. “Oblate” came to me thanks to a sign on Route 95 in Maryland. It says, “Oblates of Our Lady of the Highways.” An oblate is a person who devotes themselves to a religious order. I like the word and thought it a fitting title for this painting.
I have been driving that stretch of Route 95 for more than twenty years. Only now, as I wrote this blog post, did I uncover a fascinating story about “Our Lady of the Highways.” https://www.ncregister.com/news/our-lady-of-the-highways
Comments are welcome!
barbararachkoscoloreddust.com 