Blog Archives
Q: What stands out from your experiences in India? (Question from “Pastel, Passion, and Perseverance: An Interview with Barbara Rachko” in .ART Odyssey: Healing)
Ahmedabad – Danapith, India
A: The chaos of the cities. The constant honking, the traffic, the sheer density. I used to think New York was crazy until I went to Delhi and Mumbai—then I came home and New York felt peaceful. But visually, India is extraordinary: the clothing, the buildings, the surprises. Once I was in a bus at a traffic light and saw the back end of an elephant sticking out of a pickup truck.
You never forget things like that. They’re unique to a place.
Comments are welcome!
Q: Do colors stay with you from your journeys, particularly to Bolivia and India? (Question from “Pastel, Passion, and Perseverance: An Interview with Barbara Rachko” in .ART Odyssey: Healing)
Sari shop window, Jaisalmer – Sadar Bazar, India
A: Yes. For Bolivia I think of red, white, and green—the colors of the flag. l even chose to use red frames as a kind of homage. For India, multi-colored patterns always come to mind because of women’s saris and white too, which Hindus wear on important occasions. Certain places attach themselves to your memory through color.
Comments are welcome!
Q: Travel clearly plays an important role in your practice. What does it give you? (Question from “Pastel, Passion, and Perseverance: An Interview with Barbara Rachko” in .ART Odyssey: Healing)
With friends at a Buddhist Monastery, Gangtok, India
A: Travel is the spark. It opens you up, makes you think differently, introduces you to people everywhere.
It makes you realize that people are the same wherever you go – which in turn makes all the political divisions and wars feel so senseless.
The work itself gets made in silence, but those bright sparks from travel feed that silence. Countries like India and Bolivia are full of character and color. They shift your perspective, and you bring that back to the studio.
Q: You’ve been working with the same medium and subject matter for decades. How did that begin, and how has it sustained you for so long? (Question from “Pastel, Passion, and Perseverance: An Interview with Barbara Rachko” in .ART Odyssey: Healing)
A: Back in the early 1990s I began using folk art as my subject matter, and I was incredibly lucky. More than thirty years later, I’m still working with it. As artists, we don’t know at the start whether a subject will sustain us, whether it will keep our curiosity alive. For me it has. I’ve always been fascinated by different cultures around the world, and that continues to feed the work. There’s freedom in that kind of framework.
I chose pastel on sandpaper as my medium. I don’t have to question it anymore. That choice itself has opened space to keep growing.
Comments are welcome!
