Blog Archives
Q: You’re also known for being remarkably consistent with your blog and writing. How do you keep that rhythm? (Question from “Pastel, Passion, and Perseverance: An Interview with Barbara Rachko” in .ART Odyssey: Healing)
A page from the interview
A: It’s become habit. I started in 2012 and now I post twice a week.
On Wednesdays, I quote from a book I’m reading, paired with a photo. On Saturdays, I rotate: one week “What’s on the Easel,” another a travel photo, and twice a month a short reflection. Only two posts a month require real writing, so it’s sustainable. Consistency has been everything.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 685
Another of my favorite books!
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
HM: The great benefit I took from visits with Renoir was realizing that even after a long working life, an artist’s curiosity could remain unquenched. The hope of some further progress, something to be added to his œuvre, was what kept Renoir alive. He was painting a “bathing” picture (now, finally, in the Musée du Louvre) and doing it with some difficulty because the picture was quite big and Renoir’s hands weren’t very nimble. But it’s only now, when I think about it, that I realize he must have found it hard; it would never occur to you when you saw him at his canvas – there was such intellectual urgency about everything he did.
Another big lesson I learned from visiting Renoir was that this man, riddled with pain and infirmity – his legs were so stiff he couldn’t walk a single step – could still be happy working and talking about his work. When you were with him for a while and he’d warmed to the conversation, you hadn’t the least sense that you were talking to an old man; his eyes were so full of life and intelligence that you forgot his age.
Henri Matisse in Chatting With Matisse: The Lost 1941 Interview, Henri Matisse with Pierre Courthion, edited by Serge Guilbault
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Pearls from artists* # 684
*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 often think that we should invent another word altogether for what real artists are doing… outside of, and despite, the market, so we could divorce ourselves from what ‘Art’ has devolved into. I aspire to create a new and visionary paradigm far away from the old one. I wish all the art magazines and blogs would declare that there is no longer any money to be made or any fame to be had, so all the people who were in for the wrong reasons would simply go away.
I want artists everywhere to figure out how to tap into their own deep well, the unpredictable source inside that can keep their work fresh and alive. I hope they build confidence to consistently preserve their integrity and independence. I long for them to trust their own intuition, to keep them on their true path as their work evolves. Finally, I yearn for them to reject anything that gets in the way of actualizing their deepest voice, so they might step into that expansive space that the universe has intended for them since the day they appeared on this earth.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
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Q: Do you have any big projects coming up?
A: I certainly do! I have been a painter for forty years, and for most of that time, my work has been shaped by foreign travel. At seventy-two, I find myself thinking about legacy — what I want to leave behind. Documenting my creative process on film has become an essential part of this objective.
In the “Bolivianos” series, I have been creating pastel-on-sandpaper paintings that transform the vivid masks of the Bolivian Carnival into universal archetypes. I first encountered these masks at a museum in La Paz in 2017.
Circumstances have aligned perfectly for an exciting next step: another trip to Bolivia and a new documentary. Our upcoming film will be a follow-up to the award-winning “Barbara Rachko: True Grit” (released in 2023), marking a deeper exploration of my thirty-five-year engagement with folk art from Mexico, Central America, and South America.
(See https://youtu.be/JJWLy84kXI0?si=v7JHIq9ViYGgs76U)
In February 2026, I will return to Bolivia with a two-person film crew to experience Carnival firsthand — to immerse myself in its rhythm, history, and meaning. Recognized by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, this festival offers an extraordinary window into Bolivia’s cultural soul.
Our film will chronicle my journey as essential research — a vital continuation of my creative inquiry over these past decades. With this trip and film, I hope to create my next body of pastel-on-sandpaper paintings, rich with color, spirit, and the enduring vitality of Oruro’s Carnival.
Comments are welcome!
Q: What’s on the easel today?
My next project!
A. I am starting another “Bolivianos” pastel painting. It’s hard to believe, but this is number 34 in the series! This body of work began in 2017 and the paintings continue to keep improving, I believe.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 663
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
”No one has made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It is more likely to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker. It isn’t that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place. Its concern is the edge, and a making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge.”
– Mary Oliver
…Mary Oliver was right. Masterpieces are not conceived at cocktail parties, clubs, or on crowded beaches. If you want to summon your muse and set the stage for astonishing things to happen, silence is the most essential prerequisite. It is where the real alchemy of art happens. You need to calm yourself in that fragile place that exists parallel to this one. When some intruder from the underworld of quotidian life smashes through, demanding our focus, all the glittering magic scatters, and flies away.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 659
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Your only goal is to be the purest and strongest version of yourself, and to articulate that as fully as possible through your creations. Avoid any enticements that threaten to eclipse the priority of your work, to lure you off in another direction toward a different goal. You are here to spend a lifetime exploring and refining what excites you.
Like Olympic athletes, trailblazing artists do not waste a second looking around at their competition to measure how they are doing. They do not look to the sidelines to measure their applause. They just keep moving forward, in the focused direction of their vision. When you possess a quiet, solid confidence and you are completely unshaken (not even a twitch) when someone looks at your work and says, ‘I don’t really like it,’ you have arrived. If you are not there yet, keep practicing. The opinions of others are simply the ever-shifting clouds, moving across your infinite azure sky.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 652
Dyke Marsh, Alexandria, VA
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
And now my old dog is dead, and another I had after him, and my parents are dead, and that first world, that old house, is sold and lost, and the books I gathered there lost, or sold – but more books bought, and in another place, board by board and stone by stone, like a house, a true life built, and all because I was steadfast about one or two things: loving foxes, and poems, the blank piece of paper, and my own energy – and mostly the shimmering shoulders of the world that shrug carelessly over the fate of any individual, that they may, the better, keep the Niles and the Amazons flowing.
And that I did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life. It is mine. I made it and I can do what I want with it. Give it back, someday, without bitterness to the wild and weedy dunes.
Mary Oliver in Upstream: Selected Essays
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 635
Dinard, Brittany, France
*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 body of writing takes a thousand different forms,
and there is no right way to measure.
Changing, changing at the flick of a hand, its various
forms are difficult to capture.
Words and phrases compete with one another, but the
mind is still master.
Caught between the unborn and the living, the writer
struggles to maintain both depth and surface.
He may depart from the square, he may overstep the
circle, searching for the one true form of his reality.
He would fill the eyes of his readers with splendor, he
would sharpen the mind’s values.
The one whose language is muddled cannot do it;
only when mind is clear can language be noble.
Lu Chi quoted in Free Play: Improvisation in Art and Life by Stephen Nachmanovitch
Comments are welcome!
Q: Did you formally study art? (Question from “Cultured Focus Magazine”)
A: My bachelor’s degree in Psychology is from the University of Vermont. I did not formally study art, unless you want to count the several years-worth of drawing and painting classes I took at the Art League School in Alexandria, VA. I never went to art school so do not have a bachelor’s or master’s degree in art.
Much later, in the early 2000s, I was compelled to study photography at the International Center of Photography in New York. This is a rather long story.
On September 11, 2001, my husband Bryan Jack, a high-ranking federal government employee, a brilliant economist and a budget analyst at the Pentagon, was on his way to present his monthly guest lecture in economics at the Naval Postgraduate College in Monterey, CA. He was a passenger on the plane that departed from Dulles Airport and was high-jacked and crashed into the Pentagon.
Losing Bryan on 9/11 was the biggest shock of my life, devastating in every way imaginable. We were soulmates and newly married. I have lived with his loss every single day for more than twenty years now. Life has never been the same.
In the summer of 2002 I was beginning to feel ready to get back to work. Learning about photography and cameras became essential avenues to my well-being.
My first challenge was learning how to use Bryan’s 4 x 5 view camera. Bryan had always taken the 4 x 5 negatives from which I derived the reference photos that were essential tools for making pastel paintings. I enrolled in a one-week view camera workshop at the International Center of Photography in New York. Surprisingly, it was very easy. I had derived substantial technical knowledge just from watching Bryan for many years.
After the view camera workshop, I decided to throw myself into learning this new medium, beginning with Photography I. I spent the next few years taking many classes at ICP and learning as much as I could. Eventually, I learned how to use Bryan’s extensive collection of film cameras, to properly light the setups that served as subject material for my “Domestic Threats” pastel paintings, and to make my own large chromogenic prints in a darkroom.
Then in October 2009 I was invited to present a solo photography exhibition at a gallery in New York. Continuing to make art after Bryan’s death had seemed like such an impossibility. I remember thinking how proud he would have been to know I became a good photographer.
Comments are welcome!
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