Category Archives: Studio
My blog turns 5 years old today! Here is the very first post from July 15, 2012. Q: What does it take to be an artist, especially one living and working in New York?
Barbara’s Studio with works in progress.
A: The three Big P’s – Patience, Persistence, and Passion. Without all three you will not have the stamina to work tirelessly for very little external reward. You can expect help from no one.
There are so many obstacles to art-making and countless reasons to just give up. When you really think about it, it’s amazing that great art gets made at all. So why do we do it? Above all it’s about making our time on earth matter, about devotion to our innate gifts and love of our hard-fought creative process.
And, my God, it even gets harder as we get older! So what do we do? We dig in that much deeper. It’s a most noble and sacred calling – you know when you have it – and that’s what separates those of us who are in it for the long haul from the wimps, fakers, and hangers-on. I say to my fellow artists who continue to work despite the endless challenges, we are all true heroes!
If you were to visit my studio now, you would see more tables chock full of pastels and notice other changes from the photo above. Most importantly though, what I wrote five years ago still rings true!
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 253
Barbara’s studio with works in progress
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
There is a notion that creative people are absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true. For they are in another world altogether. It is a world where the third self is governor. Neither is the purity of art the innocence of childhood, if there is such a thing. One’s life as a child, with all its emotional rages and ranges, is but grass for the winged horse – it must be chewed well in those savage teeth. There are irreconcilable differences between acknowledging and examining the fabulations of one’s past and dressing them up as though they were adult figures, fit for art, which they will never be. The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work – who is responsible to the work.
Mary Oliver in Upstream: Selected Essays
Comments are welcome!
Q: What would you say is your underlying motivation as a contemporary artist?
Museum of Ethnography and Folklore, La Paz, Bolivia
A: What motivates me is the desire to make great art, to develop my innate talents to their fullest, to share the hard-won knowledge I have gained along the way, and to bring as much beauty into this life as possible. It’s never been easy, but I’m trying to spend my short time on this earth as an artist, doing the work I was always meant to do!
Comments are welcome!
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″.
Comments are welcome!
Q: Would you talk about a few of the technical properties that made pastel your medium of choice?
Barbara’a pastels
A: Pastel is a time-tested medium that has been in use for five hundred years. I fell in love with it nearly thirty years ago and it has been my primary medium ever since.
Pastel is known to be the most permanent of all media. It has no liquid binder that might cause oxidizing with the passage of time as often happens with other painting media. Pastel colors are intense because they are the closest artists get to working with pure pigment. Artists throughout history have generally favored pastel because it allows a spontaneous approach with no drying time and no change of color.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 249
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.
Interviewer: Can a writer learn style?
Capote: No, I don’t think that style is consciously arrived at, any more than one arrives at the color of one’s eyes. After all, your style is you. At the end the personality of a writer has so much to do with the work. The personality has to be humanly there. Personality is a debased word, I know, but it’s what I mean. The writer’s individual humanity, his word or gesture towards the world, has to appear almost like a character that makes contact with the reader. If the personality is vague or confused or merely literary, ca ne va pas. Faulkner, Mc Cullers – they project their personality at once.
Truman Capote 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!
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!
Pearls from artists* # 245
Barbara’s studio with works in progress
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Just as a puppy dog strives to become nothing but simply a dog and as thoroughly a dog as possible, one has to grow into art as the mode of existence for which one’s heart and lungs were made, as the only appropriate option. If one chances upon art from the outside, it ends up being nothing but a bad disguise, and life, in its unshakeable honesty, takes it upon itself to tear off this masquerade.
The Poet’s Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke, edited and translated by Ulrich Baer
Comments are welcome!
