Category Archives: Creative Process
Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: I’m working on a large pastel painting based on a photograph shot when I was vacationing recently in La Paz, Bolivia. How fortuitous to stumble upon a mask exhibition at The National Museum of Ethnography and Folklore! It felt as though the exhibition somehow was staged for me, just waiting for me to come along and photograph it.
Incredibly, I returned to New York, after a spectacular trip to Bolivia, and found myself with photographs that are inspiring a new series. Certainly this has never happened before! The series is tentatively called, “Bolivianos.”
Comments are welcome!
Q: How can you tell with certainty when a pastel painting is finished?
“Poker Face,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″
A: For me a work is finished when to add or subtract some element causes the composition to diminish or somehow weaken. It’s mostly a matter of where I want viewers to look and how I decide to lead their eyes around a painting.
I work on each piece for several months so that by the time it’s nearly done, I can no longer see flaws. I put it aside for a week or two. Then I pull it out again, turn it upside down, and any details that need improving become obvious. Once I fix them, I know the painting is finally finished and ready to be signed, photographed, and delivered to my framer.
Comments are welcome!
Start/Finish of “The Ancestors,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58″ x 38″ image, 70″ x 50″ framed
Beginning
Finished
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Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: I am putting a few finishing touches on “Conundrum,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″.
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Pearls from artists* # 250
Start of “Conundrum,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
In my opinion, if I could write all my work again, I am convinced that I would do it better, which is the healthiest condition for an artist. That’s why he keeps on working, trying again; he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won’t, which is why this condition is healthy. Once he did it, once he matched the work to the image, the dream, nothing would remain but to cut his throat, jump off the other side of that pinnacle of perfection suicide. I’m a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.
William Faulkner in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews First Series, edited, and with an introduction by Malcolm Crowley
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Start/Finish of “Provocateur,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 26″ x 20″ image, 35″ x 28 1/2″ framed
Beginning
Finished and signed
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 247
A recent charcoal study
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Studies made in the open air are different from pictures that are destined to be shown in public. The latter, in my opinion, result from the studies, but they may, or even must, differ a great deal from them. For in the picture the painter rather gives a personal impression, while in a study his aim is simply to analyze a bit of nature – either to make his idea or conception more correct, or to find a new idea; for example, the studies of Mauve, which I myself like very much, precisely because of their soberness and because they are done so faithfully. Still they miss a certain charm, which the pictures that result from them possess in such a high degree.
I believe one gets more sound ideas when thoughts arise from direct contact with things than when one looks at them with the set purpose of finding certain facts in them. It is the same with the question of a colour scheme. There are colours that harmonize wonderfully, but I try my best to paint a subject as I see it before I set to work to make it as I feel it. Yet feeling is a great thing, and without it one would not be able to do anything. Thus, studies belong more to the studio than among the pubic.
Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh, edited by Irving Stone
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Q: You use an impressive assortment of soft pastels to create your pastel paintings. Which are your favorite?
Barbara’s studio
A: My favorite brand of soft pastels is Henri Roché. They offer subtle variations in color and hue since they make more colors than any other company.
As a birthday present a few years ago, I treated myself to a full 750-color set. I mainly use them for finishing touches, rather than letting them get buried under pastel. At nearly $20 a stick, I also don’t want see them reduced to colored dust on the floor beneath my easel. One of my peers calls them, “the Maserati of pastels!”
Isobel Roché told me that her goal is to reach 1000 colors in time for the company’s 300th anniversary in 2020! I hope she makes it.
These pastels have been around so long that Degas and other artists of the era used them. It’s humbling to know that I am working with the same materials and following a long and prestigious art tradition of using soft pastel.
Comments are welcome!
Q: What art book are you reading for inspiration now?
Barbara’s copy of “Dear Theo”
A: I am re-reading “Dear Theo,” van Gogh’s autobiography as expressed in letters to his beloved brother, a book I read more than twenty-five years ago when I first started out as an artist. My copy is beat up and yellowing, but still holding together.
It’s a source of pure solace. Keeping and growing a studio practice in New York is fraught with complexity, challenges, increasing demands on one’s time, etc. So I sometimes need reminding about the joyful aspects of being an artist, about why I decided to devote my time to this work in the first place, about what I love about this often difficult and frustrating life I chose. And Van Gogh’s sensitive, soulful words always deliver!
Comments are welcome!
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