Category Archives: Working methods
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.
Comments are welcome!
Q: What do you do when you are feeling undervalued and/or misunderstood as a visual artist?
On a favorite walk
A: After more than three decades as a professional artist, I wish I could say this rarely happens, but that’s not the case. People say dumb things to artists all the time and I’m no exception. Often I tune it out, remembering the title of a terrific book by Hugh MacLeod called, “Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity.” Come to think of it, it’s time for a re-read of Hugh’s wise book.
But ignoring people is not always possible. So I might take a break from the studio, go for a long walk along the Hudson River, compose photographs, think about what’s bothering me, and try to refocus and remember all the positive things that art-making has brought to my life. I always feel better after this simple ritual.
Here’s another helpful quote that I read recently and try to remember:
‘’An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.” – Charles Cooley
I wonder, what do you do?
Comments are welcome!
Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: “Schemer,” Soft Pastel on Sandpaper, 26” x 20” is nearly finished. Among other things, I will do more blending to soften the transitions from light to dark in the fabric.
Comments are welcome!
Q: Why do you make art?
“Why Do I Make Art” by Ursula von Rydingsvard
A: Last spring I viewed Ursula von Rydingsvard’s exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. One thing that stayed with me is her wall text, “Why Do I Make Art by Ursula von Rydingsvard” in which she listed a few dozen benefits that art-making has brought to her life.
I want to share some of my own personal reasons here, in no particular order. My list keeps changing, but these are true at least for today.
1. Because I love the entire years-long creative process – from foreign travel whereby I discover new source material, to deciding what I will make, to the months spent in the studio realizing my ideas, to packing up my newest pastel painting and bringing it to my Virginia framer’s shop, to seeing the framed piece hanging on a collector’s wall, to staying in touch with collectors over the years and learning how their relationship to the work changes.
2. Because I love walking into my studio in the morning and seeing all of that color! No matter what mood I am in, my spirit is immediately uplifted.
3. Because my studio is my favorite place to be… in the entire world. I’d say that it is my most precious creation. It’s taken more than twenty-two years to get it this way. I hope I never have to move!
4. Because I get to listen to my favorite music all day or to Public Radio stations.
5. Because when I am working in the studio, if I want, I can tune out the world and all of it’s urgent problems. The same goes for whatever personal problems I am experiencing.
6. Because I am devoted to my medium. How I use pastel continually evolves. It’s exciting to keep learning about its properties and to see what new techniques will develop.
7. Because I have been given certain gifts and abilities and that entails a sacred obligation to USE them. I could not live with myself were I to do otherwise.
8. Because art-making gives meaning and purpose to my life. I never wake up in the morning wondering, how should I spend the day? I have important work to do and a place to do it. I know this is how I am supposed to be spending my time on earth.
9. Because I have an enviable commute. To get to my studio it’s a thirty-minute walk, often on the High Line early in the morning before throngs of tourists have arrived.
10. Because life as an artist is never easy. It’s a continual challenge to keep forging ahead, but the effort is also never boring.
11. Because each day in the studio is different from all the rest.
12. Because I love the physicality of it. I stand all day. I’m always moving and staying fit.
13. Because I have always been a thinker more than a talker. I enjoy and crave solitude. I am often reminded of the expression, “She who travels the farthest, travels alone.” In my work I travel anywhere.
14. Because spending so much solitary time helps me understand what I think and feel and to reflect on the twists and turns of my unexpected and fascinating life.
15. Because I learn about the world. I read and do research that gets incorporated into the work.
16. Because I get to make all the rules. I set the challenges and the goals, then decide what is succeeding and what isn’t. It is working life at its most free.
17. Because I enjoy figuring things out for myself instead of being told what to do or how to think.
18. Because despite enormous obstacles, I am still able to do it. Art-making has been the focus of my life for thirty-three years – I was a late bloomer – and I intend to continue as long as possible.
19. Because I have been through tremendous tragedy and deserve to spend the rest of my life doing exactly what I love. The art world has not caught up yet, but so be it. This is my passion and my life’s work and nothing will change that.
20. Because thanks to the internet and via social media, my work can be seen in places I have never been to and probably will never go.
21. Because I would like to be remembered. The idea of leaving art behind for future generations to appreciate and enjoy is appealing.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 375
Tile worker in South India
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
With the camera you interpret reality. Photography is not truth. The photographer interprets reality and, above all, constructs his own reality according to his own awareness or his own emotions. Sometimes it’s complicated because it’s a kind of schizophrenic phenomenon. Without the camera, you see the world in one way, with the camera, in another. Through the window, you’re composing, and even dreaming about, this reality as if, through the camera, you were synthesizing what you are with what you’ve learned of a certain place. Then you make your own image, your own interpretation. The same thing happens to a writer as to a photographer. It’s impossible to capture the truth of life.
Graciela Iturbide in Eyes to Fly With: Portraits, Self-Portraits, and Other Photographs
Comments are welcome!
Start/Finish of “Sentinels,” Soft Pastel on Sandpaper, 38” x 58”
Start
Finished, signed lower left
Comments are welcome!
Q: What’s on the easel today?
Preliminary sketch
A: This is a preliminary charcoal sketch for my next large (58” x 38”) pastel painting. I loved seeing “The Champ,” 26” x 20,” blown-up as a poster in the London Underground so I decided to create a larger original. Now I can’t wait to tackle all that hair! So far the sketch resembles a Rastafarian, but who knows if that will carry over to the pastel painting! Stay tuned.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 372
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.
Artists will, in their long education of sifting through what they like and respond to and what they don’t, find they “see” an artist’s work in the environment. They see a Corot or a Hopper. They know then that they have found a good subject because of the similarity of poetic attraction. They see with a set of limits or conventions that speak to them.
But as time goes on and you continue working, you find you do not consider those subjects any longer but they still register. They belong to someone else. You have found other affinities. Or perhaps more importantly you have found your own. You respond now to your own internal song. Art is about art as much as it is about nature. Everything we respond to has passed through our filter of artistic influences.
Ian Roberts in Creative Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 371
“Poseur,” Soft Pastel on Sandpaper, 58” x 38” at the framer
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
If you look at the work of an artist over a lifetime there is always transformation. Some hit a lively pace early on and then seem to lose it later. Others find that place progressively throughout their life; others still find it late. But regardless, they are all learning to isolate the poetic within them. That focus on the poetic in our own work increases our appreciation of the beauty around us, increases our growth, and increases our divine connection.
One thing you see in many artists’ work is that as they continue over the decades to translate their experience of the poetic into form, they learn to communicate better. They strip away all the extraneous stuff and artistic baggage they had. They say more with less.
Ian Roberts in Creative Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 370
Barbara at work on “The Orator.” Photo: Maria Cox
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Nothing determines your creative life more than doing it. This is so obvious and fundamental, yet how much energy is wasted on speculation, worry, and doubt without the relief of action. “Success is 90 percent just showing up.” I can’t tell you the number of problems that are solved with this one simple principle, because when you start, it leads to something, anything. And when you have something tangible in front of you, then you can react to it and amend it. And that will lead to something else. In the book, In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman Jr., which looked at companies in America that excelled at what they did, one of the guiding principles was, “Do it, mend it, fix it.”
Ian Roberts in Creative Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision
Comments are welcome!
