Category Archives: Pastel Painting
Q: What are your most significant professional accomplishments to date?
“Big Deal,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58″ x 38″
A: I will mention these: my 1996 solo exhibition at a venerable New York gallery that specialized in Latin American-influenced art, Brewster Arts Ltd. at 41 West 57th Street; completion of Aljira’s Emerge 2000 business program for professional artists; and a solo exhibition at the Walton Art Center in Fayetteville, AR, in 2005. All three were very important factors in my artistic and professional development.
In January I published my first eBook, From Pilot to Painter, on Amazon.
In February I was interviewed by Brainard Carey for his Yale University Radio program. It can be heard at
http://museumofnonvisibleart.com/interviews/barbara-rachko/
Most recently I was interviewed for a fourteen-page article (the longest they have ever published on a single artist!) in ARTiculAction Art Review. Please see
http://issuu.com/articulaction/docs/articulaction_art_review_-_july_201/30
Comments are welcome!
Q: How long does it take you to complete a pastel-on-sandpaper painting?
Barbara’s studio
A: Mine is a slow and labor-intensive process. First, there is foreign travel to find the cultural objects – masks, carved wooden animals, paper mâché figures, and toys – that are my subject matter. If they are heavy I ship them home.
Next comes planning exactly how to photograph them, lighting and setting everything up, and shooting a roll of 220 film with my Mamiya 6 camera. I still like to use an analog camera for my fine art work, although I am rethinking this. I have the film developed, decide which image to use, and order a 20” x 24” reference photograph from Manhattan Photo on West 20th Street.
Then I am ready to start. I work on each pastel-on-sandpaper painting for approximately three months. I am in my studio 7 to 8 hours a day, five days a week. During that time I make thousands of creative decisions as I apply and layer soft pastels (I have 8 tables-worth to choose from!), blend them with my fingers, and mix new colors directly on the sandpaper. A finished piece consists of up to 30 layers of soft pastel. My self-invented technique accounts for the vivid, intense color that often leads viewers of my originals to look very closely and ask, “What medium is this?” I believe I am pushing soft pastel to its limits, using it in ways that no other artist has done.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 100
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.
I think it’s terribly important that people have always made structures that are better and more rigorous and more demanding than we as an audience can live up to for every single moment. Serious art should be better than you are. I think my plays are more lucid, more rigorous, than I, Richard, am in my life. I’m a stumble bum like all the rest of us. Create art that is better than you are able to manifest in normal life.
Richard Foreman in Anne Bogart’s Conversations with Anne: Twenty-four Interviews
Comments are welcome!
Q: What’s on the easel today?
Pastel painting in progress
A: I am working on an untitled small, 20″ x 26″, pastel-on-sandpaper painting.
Pearls from artists* # 99
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.
I think there are two very interesting stages in creative work. One is confusion and one is boredom. They generally both mean that there’s a big fish swimming under the water. As Rilke said, “Live the questions.” And not judge that there’s something wrong about confusion, because the people who are working, say, on the cure for leprosy – they work for years and years in a state of confusion, and very often they don’t find the cure. They find something completely different. But they keep living the question. Confusion is absolutely essential to the creative process. If there was no confusion, why do it? I always feel that all of us have questions we’re asking all our lives, for our work, and if we ever found the answer, we’d stop working. We wouldn’t need to work anymore.
Boredom – if you’ve ever been in therapy, you’d know that when you start getting bored, that’s really important. The therapist sits up; there’s something going on, because the wall that you come against – that’s where the real gold is. It’s really precious.
Andre Gregory (from My Dinner with Andre) in Anne Bogart, Conversations with Anne: Twenty-four Interviews
Comments are welcome!
Q: Who is your favorite artist and why?
Catalogue of Matisse’s late work
A: I admire the work of many artists, but if I have to choose only one then I’d say Matisse. Whenever there is a Matisse exhibition in New York, I try to see it at least once. Many years ago I read Hillary Spurling’s definitive two-volume biography (The Unknown Matisse, published 1998, and Matisse the Master, 2005) and became fascinated with how his life unfolded, how Matisse struggled and overcame daunting obstacles in order to make art, and how his work continued to grow and evolve throughout his long life.
I believe that Matisse and I are kindred souls in three respects: we both came from unpromising beginnings (he from a textile family in northern France, me from a blue collar family in New Jersey), our fathers did not support our interest in becoming artists, and he famously worked in series (I am well into my third series).
Comments are welcome!
Q: What does your creative process look like when you are ready to begin a new painting?
Preliminary sketch
A: My working methods have changed dramatically over the years with my current process being a much-simplified version of how I used to work. In other words as I pared down my imagery in the “Black Paintings,” my process quite naturally pared down, too.
One constant is that I have always worked in series with each pastel painting leading quite logically to the next. Another is that I always have set up a scene, lit and photographed it, and worked with a 20″ x 24″ photograph as the primary reference material. In the “Domestic Threats” series I shot with a 4″ x 5″ view camera. Nowadays the first step is to decide which photo I want to make into a painting (currently I have a backlog of images to choose from) and to order a 19 1/2″ x 19 1/2″ image (my Mamiya 6 shoots square images and uses film) printed on 20″ x 24″ paper. I get the print made at Manhattan Photo on West 20th Street in New York. Typically I have in mind the next two or three paintings that I want to create.
Once I have the reference photograph in hand, I make a preliminary tonal charcoal sketch on a piece of white drawing paper. The sketch helps me think about how to proceed and points out potential problem areas ahead. For example, in the photograph above I had originally thought about creating a vertical painting, but changed to horizontal format after discovering spatial problems in my sketch.
Also, I decided to make a small painting now because it has been two years since I last worked in a smaller (than my usual 38″ x 58″) size. I am re-using the photograph on which “Epiphany” is based. Using a photograph a second time lets me see how my working methods have evolved over time.
Comments are welcome!
Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: I am putting finishing touches on “Incognito.”
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 94
Working on “False Friends” Photo: Diana Feit
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
A work of art which inspires us comes from no quibbling or uncertain man. It is the manifest of a very positive nature in great enjoyment, and at the very moment the work was done.
It is not enough to have thought great things before doing the work. The brush stroke at the moment of contact carries inevitably the exact state of being of the artist at that exact moment into the work, and there it is, to be seen and read by those who can read such signs, and to be read later by the artist himself, with perhaps some surprise, as a revelation of himself.
For an artist to be interesting to us he must be interesting to himself. He must have been capable of intense feeling, and capable of profound contemplation.
He who has contemplated has met with himself, is in a state to see into the realities beyond the surfaces of his subject. Nature reveals to him, and, seeing and feeling intensely, he paints, and whether he wills it or not each brush stroke is an exact record of such as he was at the exact moment the stroke was made.
The Art Spirit by Robert Henri
Comments are welcome!
Q: How long have you been working in your current studio?
Barbara in her studio; Photo: Elliott Jones
A: I have been in my West 29th Street space for seventeen years, but from the beginning, in the mid-1980’s, I had a studio. My first one was in the spare bedroom of the Alexandria, Virginia, house that I shared with Bryan and that I still own. For about three years in the 1990s I had a studio on the third floor of the Torpedo Factory Art Center, a building in Alexandria that is open to the public. People come in, watch artists work, and occasionally buy a piece of art.
In April 997 an opportunity to move to New York arose and I didn’t look back. By then I was showing in a good 57th Street gallery, Brewster Arts Ltd. (the gallery focused exclusively on Latin American artists; I was thrilled with the company I was in; the only fellow non-Latina represented by owner, Mia Kim, was Leonora Carrington), and I had managed to find a New York agent, Leah Poller, with whom to collaborate. I looked at only one other space before finding my West 29th Street studio. An old friend of Bryan’s from Cal Tech rented the space next door and he had told us it was available. Initially the studio was a sublet. The lease-holder was a painter headed to northern California to work temporarily for George Lucas at the Lucas Ranch. After several years she decided to stay so I was able to take over the lease.
My studio continues to be an oasis in a chaotic city, a place to make art, to read, and to think. I love to walk in the door every morning and always feel more calm the moment I arrive. It’s my absolute favorite place in New York!
Comments are welcome!
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