Category Archives: Studio
Pearls from artists* # 388
Barbara’a 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.
… the artist’s nature, that wild nature to which so many powers are entrusted, and which all too often abuses them, leading cold reason, the bourgeois public, and even some connoisseurs down a myriad barren paths, precisely where the capricious white-winged sprite discovers castles, epics, works of art! A nature sometimes mocking, sometimes kind, at once fertile and desolate!
Honore Balzac in The Unknown Masterpiece
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Q: What is your favorite thing about creating on sandpaper? (Cassandra Alvarado Oliphant via Instagram)
Ready to start
A: Undoubtedly, I could not make my work without UART sandpaper since my entire pastel technique evolved around it. I use 400 and 500 grit. My favorite thing about it is its ‘tooth’ (i.e. texture or roughness).
Over the many months I spend creating a painting, I build layer upon layer of soft pastel. Because this paper is relatively “toothy,” it accepts all of the pastel the painting needs. And as many people know, I own and use thousands of soft pastels!
Many layers of soft pastel and several months of studio time go into creating each painting. My self-invented technique is analogous to the glazing techniques used by the Old Masters, who slowly built up layers of thin oil paint to achieve a high degree of finish. Colors were not only mixed physically, but optically.
Similarly, I gradually build up layers of soft pastel, as many as thirty, to create a pastel painting. After applying a color, I blend it with my fingers and push it into the sandpaper’s tooth. It mixes with the color beneath to create a new color, continually adding richness, saturation, and intensity to the piece. By the time a pastel painting is finished, the colors are bold, vibrant, and exciting.
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Pearls from artists* # 387
Barbara at work on “Schemer,” Soft Pastel on Sandpaper, 26” x 20”
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
You know, you don’t go into the studio and say, “Oh, here I am this marvelous heroine, this wonderful woman doing my marvelous painting so all these marvelous women artists can come after me and do their marvelous painting.” There you are alone in this huge space and you are not conscious of the fact that you have breasts and a vagina. You are inside yourself, looking at a damned piece of rag on the wall that you are supposed to make a world out of. That is all you are conscious of. I simply cannot believe that a man feels differently… Inside yourself, you are looking at this terrifying unknown and trying to feel, to pull everything you can out of all your experience, to make something. I think a woman or a man creating feels very much the same way. I bring my experience, which is different from a man’s, yes, and I put it where I can. But once that is done, I don’t know if it is a woman’s experience I’m looking at.
Grace Hartigan quoted in Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel
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Pearls from artists* # 386
Barbara’s studio with recent 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.
[Art] is concerned with something that cannot be explained in words or literal description… Art is revelation instead of information, expression instead of description, creation instead of imitation or repetition… Art is concerned with the HOW, not the WHAT; not with literal content… The performance – how it is done – that is the content of art.
Joseph Albers quoted in Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel
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Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: I’m slowly working on a small, 20” x 26,” pastel painting. The tentative title is “Majordomo,” although I’m searching for something better.
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Top Facebook posts for 2019
December was a busy month! Here are the most-liked 2019 posts – all dated December – from my Facebook fan page. Please join a worldwide audience of 48,000 people who follow my work at https://facebook.com/BarbaraRachko. Thank you for your support!
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Top Instagram Posts for 2019
New Year’s Day is almost here so I decided to depart from the usual. Here are my most popular images posted on Instagram in 2019.
With Jenny Holzer – she’s waiving hello – at Rockefeller Center
Photo: Izzy Nova
Photo: Izzy Nova
Photo: Izzy Nova
More than 49,000 now!
Please consider following my work at https://Instagram.com/barbararachko_artist.
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Pearls from artists* # 382
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 a man [sic] spends his whole lifetime painting one picture or working on one piece of sculpture. The question of stopping is really a decision of moral considerations. To what extent are you intimidated by the actual act, so that you are beguiled by it? To what extent are you charmed by its inner life? And to what extent do you then really approach the intention or desire that is really outside it? The decision is always made when the purée has something in it that you wanted.
Barnett Newman quoted in The Unknown Masterpiece by Honore Balzac
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Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: “Avenger,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58” x 38” awaits finishing touches.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* 381
Barbara’s studio with work 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.
A work of art, if it is art, is not an end but a beginning. It is a challenge to the artist who produced it and to the artists around him to take the next step, to answer the questions raised by the work, to achieve what he or she has yet to accomplish. It also represents a challenge to the non-artist, who is offered a fresh vision.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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