Category Archives: Working methods
Q: What’s on the easel today?
Pastel-on-sandpaper painting in progress
A: I am working on a pastel painting that features a mask I found in Todos Santos, Mexico on a recent trip there with friends. This is the first time I have so prominently featured a head without a body so I’m unsure whether the painting is coming together just yet. Fortunately it’s very early in the process so there is plenty of time to make adjustments.
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Q: Can you discuss your process, including how you actually use Mexican and Guatemalan folk art figures in your art?
A corner of Barbara’s studio
A: When I set up the figures to photograph for a painting, I work very intuitively, so how I actually cast them in an artwork is difficult to say. Looks count a lot – I select an object and put it in a particular place, look at it, move it or let it stay, and sometimes develop a storyline. I spend time arranging lights and looking for interesting cast shadows. With my first “Domestic Threats” series, all of this was done so that Bryan, my late husband, or I could shoot a couple of negatives with his Toyo Omega 4″ x 5″ view camera. For my “Black Paintings” series, begun in 2007, I shoot medium format negatives with a Mamiya 6 camera.
I always look at a 20″ x 24″ photograph for reference as I make a pastel-on-sandpaper painting, plus I also work from the ‘live’ objects. The photograph is mainly a catalyst because finished paintings are always quite different from their associated reference photos. Also, since I spend months creating them, the paintings’ interpretative development goes way beyond that of the photo.
I once completed 6 large (58” x 38”) pastel paintings in a single year, but more recently 4 or 5 per year is common. It takes approximately 3 months to make each one. During that time I layer and blend together as many as 25 to 30 layers of pastel. Of course, the colors get more intense as the painting progresses and the pigment accumulates on the sandpaper.
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Pearls from artists* # 69
Masks from Sri Lanka, Mexico, and Bali
*
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 mission is to stay hungry. Once you need to know, you can proceed and draw distinctions. From the heat of this necessity, you reach out to content – the play, the theme, or question – and begin to listen closely, read, taste, and experience it. You learn to differentiate and interpret the sensations received while engaged with content. The perception forms the basis for expression.
Have you ever been so curious about something that the hunger to find out nearly drives you to distraction? The hunger is necessity. As an artist, your entire artistic abilities are shaped by how necessity has entered your life and then how you sustain it. It is imperative to maintain artistic curiosity and necessity. It is our job to maintain in this state of feedforward as long as humanly possible. Without necessity as the fuel for expression, the content remains theoretical. The drive to taste, discover, and express what thrills and chills the soul is the point. Creation must begin with personal necessity rather than conjecture about audience taste or fashion.
Anne Bogart in and then, you act: making art in an unpredictable world
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Q: How would you describe your personal artistic style?
Barbara’a pastels
A: Regardless of what medium I am using, I am first and foremost a colorist. Everything I create is vibrant with color.
The Navy taught me to be organized, goal-oriented and focused, to love challenges, and in everything I do, to pay attention to the details. Trying to make it as an artist in New York is nothing BUT challenges, so these qualities serve me well, whether I am creating paintings, shooting and making photographs, or trying to understand the art business, keep up with social media, and manage all the tasks required of a busy artist with a New York studio, a business, and two residences to maintain. It’s a lot, but it forces me to continually learn and grow. As Helen Keller famously said, “Life is an adventure or it is nothing.”
These days I am rarely bored. I thoroughly enjoy spending long, solitary hours working to become a better artist. I am meticulous about craft and will not let work out of my studio until it is as good as I can make it. My creative process is more exciting than ever. It’s thrilling and energizing to continually push soft pastel to its limits and use it in ways that no other artist has done before!
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Q: How do you select a photograph to use as reference material to make a pastel painting?
Photograph, left, and work in progress
A: Like everything else associated with my studio practice, my use of photographs from which to work has changed considerably. Beginning in the early 1990s all of the paintings in my first series, “Domestic Threats,” started out as elaborately staged, well-lit scenes that either my husband, Bryan, or I photographed with Bryan’s Toyo Omega 4 x 5 view camera using a wide-angle lens. Depending on where I was living at the time, I set up the scenes in one of three places: our house in Alexandria, VA, a six-floor walkup apartment on West 13th Street in New York, or my current Bank Street condominium. Then one of us shot two pieces of 4 x 5 film at different exposures and I’d usually select the more detailed one to be made into a 20″ x 24″ photo to use as a reference.
Just as the imagery in my paintings has simplified and emptied out over the years, my creative process has simplified, too. I often wonder if this is a natural progression that happens as an artist gets older. More recently I have been shooting photos independently of how exactly I will use them in my work. Only later do I decide which ones to make into paintings; sometimes it’s YEARS later. For example, the pastel painting that is on my easel now is based on a relatively old (2002) photograph that I have always liked, but only now felt ready to tackle in pastel.
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Q: How do you begin a photograph?
Untitled chromogenic print, 24″ x 24″, edition of 5
A: It always begins in my mind long before I actually start making it. By the time I take the photograph, I’ve already thought deeply about the possibilities, the formal arrangements, meanings, etc. so that setting up the objects, lighting them, and clicking the shutter feels like a reward after a long thought process. My fine art photographs are finished works in themselves. However, when I select one to use as reference for a pastel painting, a different but related process of working out my ideas and translating them into pastel occurs over the next several months spent in the studio. Of course, in that case the photo becomes only the starting point for an entirely new artwork.
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Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress, soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″
A: An untitled piece that I’ve been working on for a couple of weeks. I like that there’s an “Art Brut” thing happening here.
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Pearls from artists* # 62
“The Sovereign,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58″ x 38″
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Yes, I’m formalistically obsessed. I see in a picture what I see in nature – everything has its place and is integrated. Like a tree or a human body, the image is put together for a greater whole. If you chop off something, you immediately destroy the organism. Form is crucial to what I do, and I believe that the form, in a way, creates the content. If you don’t have the form, you don’t get the content. If you get the maximum formal relationships in a precise, organic, metaphoric methodology, then you have a better chance of bringing out the content to its full degree. Of course, a picture doesn’t stand alone by its form. You can have forms that relate but offer no meaning. Ultimately, a picture is judged by its meaning, and I think that’s what a lot of people lose sight of.
Interview with Roger Ballen in Lines, Marks, and Drawings: Through the Lens of Roger Ballen, Craig Allen Subler and Christine Mullen Kreamer
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Pearls from artists* # 59
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.
Friends sometimes ask, “Don’t you get lonely sitting by yourself all day?” At first it seemed odd to hear myself say No. Then I realized that I was not alone; I was in the book; I was with the characters. I was with my Self.
Not only do I not feel alone with my characters; they are more vivid and interesting to me than the people in my real life. If you think about it, the case can’t be otherwise. In order for a book (or any project or enterprise) to hold our attention for the length of time it takes to unfold itself, it has to plug into some internal perplexity or passion that is of paramount importance to us. The problem becomes the theme of our work, even if we can’t at the start understand or articulate it. As the characters arise, each embodies infallibly an aspect of that dilemma, that perplexity. These characters might not be interesting to anyone else but they’re absolutely fascinating to us. They are us. Meaner, smarter, sexier versions of ourselves. It’s fun to be with them because they’re wrestling with the same issue that has its hooks into us. They’re our soul mates, our lovers, our best friends. Even the villains. Especially the villains.
Stephen Pressfield in The War of Art
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Q: What’s on the easel today?
“The Ancestors,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58″ x 38″, in progress
A: I’m putting in details on “The Ancestors.” At this stage I am doing very meticulous work and progress is difficult to see in photographs (above).
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