Blog Archives
Q: Would you please share your current bio?
A: Here it is.
Barbara Rachko, born in 1953 in Paterson, New Jersey, is a contemporary painter based in New York City, renowned for her large pastel-on-sandpaper paintings inspired by Bolivian Carnival masks. With nearly 40 years dedicated to revolutionizing pastel as a fine art medium, Rachko’s influential blog, Barbara Rachko’s Colored Dust, has garnered over 229,000 subscribers. She is the subject of the acclaimed documentary “Barbara Rachko: True Grit,” available on YouTube, and her ebook “From Pilot to Painter” captures her inspiring journey from a former pilot to an accomplished artist.
Rachko’s work explores the vibrant cultural heritage of Bolivian Carnival masks, and Mexican and Guatemalan folk art. Her meticulous attention to detail is showcased in notable series such as Bolivianos, Black Paintings, and Domestic Threats. In 2023, she was featured in a documentary that premiered at the Newport Beach Film Festival, earning the Audience Award and Best in Category Award, further cementing her impact on contemporary art.
Her solo exhibitions include the Joy Pratt Markham Gallery at Walton Arts Center (AR), Louise Jones Brown Gallery at Duke University (NC), Olin Gallery (VA), and La MaMa La Galleria (NY). She trained in photography at the International Center of Photography in New York and studied drawing and pastel techniques at the Art League School in Alexandria, VA. Her works are held in private collections worldwide and have been showcased at prestigious art fairs, including Art Basel Miami, Moon Art Fair in Hamburg, and Art Busan in Korea, affirming her global influence in pastel painting.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 680
“Sacrificial” (on the wall) and “Trickster” (on the floor)
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
What makes a work transcendent and powerful is a personal intensity, an ‘extra’ quality. Yet that intensity is exclusive to each artist: extra strangeness, subtlety, causticity, bravado, sensuality, rawness, grandiosity, succinctness, mystery, vulnerability, truth, etc. For an individual artist to infuse an object or an experience with their own ‘extra’ quality requires not only skill or ideas, but the profound benevolence of consistently delivering in spades.
It is this passion and genuine feeling, specific to each creator, that lives on in the art as a gift. It is wrapped up in the work, forever suspended in time. The artist says,
Here… everything I possessed in this moment is embodied in this object… All skills I have painstakingly learned, all of the knowledge I possess, the joy and pain I have felt and all the experiences I have lived. I spun these into the perfect, most sublime form, and packed it up, but for you to unwrap anytime you need sustenance. It will nourish, comfort, and surround you, because you have chosen it.
Each viewer selects which works of art speak to them… which embodied feelings, concepts, and knowledge they value. An empathic connection is forged through the art object or experience. What is love, but to say to someone, ‘you are truly seen and understood?’ Art offers this as well, by reaching out to puncture through the membrane of our emotional isolation, to articulate how we feel in the moments when we cannot find words. It tells the artist and viewer alike, ‘You are not alone. You are not alone in how your brain works. You are not alone in the pain you feel. You are not alone in what you notice or appreciate, or in how much love you have to give.’
Pour that love into an art object. It can handle all the devotion you pack into it, and more.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
Comments are welcome!
Q: What would you be if you were not an artist?
The studio with pastel paintings in progress!
A: I honestly have no idea, but whatever it might be, there is a good chance that I’d be bored! In my younger days boredom was a strong motivator. I left the active duty Navy out of boredom. I couldn’t bear not being intellectually challenged (most of my jobs consisted of paper-pushing), not using my flying skills (at 27 I was a licensed commercial pilot and Boeing 727 flight engineer), and not developing my artistic talent. In what surely must be a first, by spending a lot of time and money training me for jobs I hated, the Navy turned me into a hard-working artist! And once I left the Navy there was no plan B. There was no time to waste. It was “full speed ahead.”
Art is a calling. You do not need to be told this if you are among those who are called. It’s all about “the work,” that all-consuming focus of an artist’s life. If a particular activity doesn’t make you a better artist, you avoid it. You work hard to nourish and protect your gifts. As artists we invent our own tasks, learn whatever we need in order to progress, and complete projects in our own time. It is life lived at its freest.
My art-making has led me to fascinating places: Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Easter island, Argentina, Uruguay, France, England, Italy, Bali, Java, India, Bhutan, and more; and to in-depth studies of intriguing subjects: drawing, color, composition, art and art history, the art business, film and film history, photography, mythology, literature, music, jazz history, and archaeology, particularly that of ancient Mesoamerica (the Olmec, Zapotec, Mixtec, Aztec, Maya, etc.). And this rich mixture continually grows! For anyone wanting to spend their time on earth learning and meeting new challenges, there is no better life than that of an artist.
I SO agree with this exchange that I read years ago between between Trisha Brown and Mikhail Baryshnikov in the New York Times. I wrote it on a piece of paper and taped it to my studio wall:
Trisha: How do you think we keep going? Are we obsessed?
Mikhail: We do it because there’s nothing better. I’m serious. Because there is nothing more exciting than that. Life is so boring, that’s why we are driven to the mystery of creation.
Comments are welcome.
Pearls from artists* # 677
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.
… in Japan, in the native Shinto religion of the land, where the rites are extremely stately, musical, and imposing, no attempt has been made to reduce their “affect images” to words. They have been left to speak for themselves – as rites, as works of art – through the eyes to the listening heart. And that, I would say, is what we, in our own religious rites, had best be doing, too. Ask an artist what his picture “means,” and you will not soon ask such a question again. Significant images render insights beyond speech, beyond the kinds of meaning speech defines. And if they do not speak to you, that is because you are not ready for them, and words will only serve to make you think you have understood, thus cutting you off altogether. You don’t ask what a dance means, you enjoy it. You don’t ask what the world means, you enjoy it. You don’t ask what you mean, you enjoy yourself; or at least, so you do when you are up to snuff.
Joseph Campbell in Myths to Live By
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 676
In the 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.
Henry James once said, ‘The great thing […] the sense of having done the best […] the sense which is the real life of the artist and the absence of which is his death, is having drawn from his own instrument the finest music that nature had hidden in it, of having played it as it should be played. He either does that or he doesn’t […]. and if he doesn’t he isn’t worth speaking of.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 674
Southampton, New York Photo: Susan Erlichman
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Everything about art requires dedication and presence. It is an intimate act, demanding the kind of sustained devotion we rarely lavish on other human beings. The artist’s generosity is highly impractical because there is no guarantee that it will ever be appreciated. Consider the level of optimism needed to repeatedly spend, even deplete, whatever reserves might be required to create the most superlative gift you could offer, one that is essentially given away to the world for free. The work we make is a love letter in a bottle, thrown into the ocean. It may or may not be read. We do not negotiate. like businesspeople, ‘You give me this, and I will give you that…’ We bequeath our pursuit of excellence and creative spirit to our audience, without reservation or qualification. We know what we have invested in it and sleep better because of it.
– Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 671
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
As a young woman—girl, actually; I was seventeen when I started taking pictures—it would appear that I didn’t have a thing to worry about from the gods. My total lack of promise is exhibit number one in the prosecution of my argument that it is work, and more work, that makes an artist. Proust became Proust that way, indeed furiously working himself to death. But you don’t have to do that—don’t kill yourself in your cork-lined room, don’t be Mozart dying from exhaustion at thirty-five, just put your head down and steadily, resolutely, pull the load.
Sally Mann in Art Work: On the Creative Life
Comments are welcome!
Q: What makes you just want to run back to the studio and start something new?
Beginnings
A: For nearly four decades, I have always worked in series, which means that one pastel painting leads quite naturally into the next. Considerable thought and planning go into each one before I ever begin, so it would be uncharacteristic for me to just start something new out of nowhere.
That said, my favorite part of the months-long creative process is when I am starting a brand new pastel painting. I get excited each time I begin a new piece because beginnings are full of so much possibility! Soon I will be looking at something I have never created before. I’ll watch it gradually take shape over months and will be challenged to solve unforeseeable problems, to continually refine and improve it along the way. The goal is always, of course, to resolve it into some sort of successful existence. Whatever happens, I know I am about to go on a very intriguing journey that will undoubtedly expand my technical knowledge and make me a much better artist.
Comments are welcome!
Q: Is there anything you wish you could change about life as a visual artist?
Barbara’s Studio
A: While there is much to admire and maybe even envy about being an artist, it does have some downsides. Among these, for me, is that enormous amounts of solitude are required to create art. I wish this were not the case.
Our work is entirely unique and because it starts as an idea in our heads, we must work solo to bring it into the world. We spend our days pondering, looking, and reacting, rather than speaking to anyone. As typical workdays go, it is rather odd.
I sometimes envy filmmakers who require collaboration with a large team of experts in order to practice their art. They have fellow professionals with whom they can discuss their ideas and they can solicit advice on how to make improvements. Artists rarely have this luxury.
On the other hand, visual artists don’t have to wait for anyone else to do their jobs before we can get to work. We don’t have to deal with personality conflicts or other people’s agendas. Our individual creative process is generally free of obstacles created by others. When you really think about it, the only thing that is required of an artist is to go to the studio and get to work! We are free to make our own rules and our own schedules, and, creatively speaking, are largely responsible for our own advances and setbacks.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 648
“Apparition,” 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.
I prefer to speak in terms of the artist’s voice. Voice is deeper, manifested from the very core of your being. It is a synthesis of the experiences, intellectual concepts, and aesthetic interests you possess, executed in your distinctive way, in the formal, emotional, and intellectual language of your chosen medium. When successful, the realization of your voice follows a gestalt principle. The combination of your ideas and the work’s physical embodiment is greater than the sum of its parts and distinguishes your outcome from everyone else’s. If we wrote down a single concept and handed it to a dozen artists, we would get very different responses from each of them, and some works would be a stronger synthesis of ideas and execution. As Frank Stella once said, “There are no good ideas for paintings, there are only good paintings… the painting IS the idea (Saltz, 2020:42).”
The art that we recognize as having singular, identifying features, those formal aspects that allow us to immediately see a work as ‘a David Wojnarowicz’ or ‘a Julie Mehretu,’ were not the product of a singular flash of brilliance. These qualities evolved as part of a sustained, life-long, ever-deepening investigation to articulate their specific and singular vision. Our voice comes from tapping into the depths of our own consciousness, then distilling the most powerful aspects of that awareness. Voice also expands and deepens over time. It evolves along with the artist.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
Comments are welcome!
barbararachkoscoloreddust.com 