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Pearls from artists* # 435
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.
Most artists are not as estranged from their fellow human beings, as bereft of reasons for existing, or as alienated from the common values and enthusiasms of the world as are the outsider characters created by existential writers like Kafka, Camus, and Sartre. But insofar as artists do regularly feel different from other people, a differentness experienced both as a sense of oddness and a sense of specialness, they identify with the outsider’s concerns and come to the interpersonal moment in guarded or distant fashion.
In part, artists are outsiders because of the personal mythology they possess. This mythology is a blend of beliefs about the importance of the individual, the responsibility of the artist as a maker of culture and a witness to the truth, and the ordained separateness of the artist. Artists often stand apart on principle, like Napoleonic figures perched on a hill overlooking the battle.
The artist may also find himself [sic] speechless in public. Around him people chat, but he has little to offer. Too much of what he knows and feels has gone directly into his art and too much has been revealed to him in solitude – infinitely more than he can share in casual conversation.
Eric Maisel, A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and Performing Artists
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Q: What do you enjoy the least about being an artist?
A recent view of the studio with works in progress
A: It’s the fact that no matter how hard an artist works there is no guarantee that money will be forthcoming soon. I work very hard at all aspects of being an artist, from creating pastel paintings and educating the public about what I do, to finding galleries with whom to partner, responding to interview requests, staying on top of social media, writing, etc. Under-appreciation seems to be the fate of too many contemporary artists.
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Pearls from artists* # 434
West Village, NYC
*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 do we carry forward? My family lived in New Jersey near Manhattan until I was ten, and although I have enjoyed spending my adult life as a photographer in the American West, when we left New Jersey for Wisconsin in 1947 I was homesick.
The only palliative I recall, beyond my parents’ sympathy was the accidental discovery in a magazine of pictures by a person of whom I had never heard but of scenes I recognized. The artist was Edward Hopper and one of the pictures was of a woman sitting in a sunny window in Brooklyn, a scene like that in the apartment of a woman who had cared for my sister and me. Other views resembled those I recalled from the train to Hoboken. There was also a picture inside a second-floor restaurant, one strikingly like the restaurant where my mother and I occasionally had lunch in New York.
The pictures were a comfort but of course none could permanently transport me home. In the months that followed, however, they began to give me something lasting, a realization of the poignancy of light. With it, all pictures were interesting.
Robert Adams in Art Can Help
Pearls from artists* # 433
Chatting with Jenny Holzer. It looks like she did not want her picture taken, but she was actually waiving.
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
…Two positions exist, the artistic and the commercial. Between these two an abiding tension persists. The eighteenth-century American painter Gilbert Stuart complained, “What a business is that of portrait painter. He is brought a potato and is expected to paint a peach.” The artist learns that the public wants peaches, not potatoes. You can paint potatoes if you like, write potatoes, dance potatoes, and compose potatoes, you can with great and valiant effort communicate with some other potato-eaters and peach-eaters. In so doing you contribute to the world’s reservoir of truth and beauty. But if you won’t give the public peaches, you won’t be paid much.
Repeatedly artists take the heroic potato position. They want their work to be good, honest, powerful – and only then successful. They want their work to be alive, not contrived and formulaic. As the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch put it: “No longer shall I paint interiors, and people reading, and women knitting. I shall paint living people, who breathe and feel and suffer and love.”
The artist is interested in the present and has little desire to repeat old, albeit successful formulas. As the painter Jenny Holzer put it, “I could do a pretty good third generation-stripe painting, but so what?
The unexpected result of the artist’s determination to do his [sic] own best art is that he is put in an adversarial relationship with the public. In that adversarial position he comes to feel rather irrational for what rational person would do work that’s not wanted?
…Serious work not only doesn’t sell well, it’s also judged by different standards. If the artist writes an imperfect but commercial novel it is likely to be published and sold. If his screenplay is imperfect but commercial enough it may be produced. If it is imperfect and also uncommercial it will not be produced. If his painting is imperfect but friendly and familiar it may sell well. If it is imperfect and also new and difficult, it may not sell for decades, if ever.
Ironically enough, the artist attempting serious work must also attain the very highest level of distinction possible. He must produce Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov but not also The Insulted and Injured or A Raw Youth, two of Dostoevsky’s nearly unknown novels. He is given precious little space in this regard.
I daresay, this last is why I devote my life to creating the most unique, technically advanced pastel paintings anyone will see!
Eric Maisel, A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and Performing Artists
Comments are welcome!
Q: Do you have any mentors?
Barbara’s studio
A. Unfortunately, no, I have had to forge my own path. I did not attend art school, but I have been fortunate to have had two excellent life-changing teachers.
To read about my circuitous path to becoming an artist, please see https://barbararachko.art/en/art-market.
Comments are welcome!
Q: What do you enjoy most about being an artist?
Barbara’s studio
A: This is a question I like to revisit every so often because life as an artist does not get easier; just the opposite, in fact. Visual artists tend to be “one man bands.” We do it all notwithstanding the fact that everything gets more difficult as we get older. It’s good to be reminded about what makes all the sacrifice and hard work worthwhile.
Even after thirty-four years as an artist, there are so many things to enjoy! I make my own schedule, set my own tasks, and follow new interests wherever they may lead. I am curious about everything and am rarely bored. I continually push my pastel technique as I strive to become a better artist. There is still so much to learn!
My relationship with collectors is another perk. I love to see pastel paintings hanging on collectors’ walls, especially when the work is newly installed and the owners are excited to take possession. This means that the piece has found a good home, that years of hard work have come full circle! And it’s often the start of a long friendship. After living with my pastel paintings for years, collectors tell me they see new details never noticed before and they appreciate the work more than ever. It’s extremely gratifying to have built a network of supportive art-loving friends around the country. I’m sure most artists would say the same!
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 430
Barbara at work on “Schemer,” Soft Pastel on Sandpaper, 26” x 20”
*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 art there must be a governing thought expressed eloquently. We must have it in ourselves, and stamp upon others, just as a medal is stamped… Art is not a pleasure trip; it is a battle, a mill that grinds. I’m not a philosopher. I don’t want to stop pain, or find a formula that makes me indifferent or stoic. Pain is, perhaps, that which makes the artist express himself most distinctly.
Jean Francois Millet quoted by Mariella Guzzoni in Vincent’s Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him
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Pearls from artists* # 427
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.
There should be a single Art Exchange in the world, to which an artist would simply send his works and be given in return as much as he needs. As it is, one has to be a merchant on top of everything else, and how badly one goes about it.
Ludwig von Beethoven quoted in Eric Maisel, A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and Performing Artists
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 426
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.
You are talented and creative. You rarely block and when you do block you know how to move yourself along. Your moods are not incapacitating and you haven’t stepped over into madness. Your personality is sufficiently integrated that your necessary arrogance doesn’t prevent you from having successful relationships. Your nonconformity hasn’t made you a pariah, and your skepticism hasn’t bred in you a nihilistic darkness. You work happily in isolation but can also move into the world and have a life. You have, in short, met the challenges posed so far.
Are you home free? Unfortunately not. The next challenges you face are as great as any posed so far. They are the multiple challenges of doing the business of art: making money, developing a career, acknowledging and making the most of your limited opportunities, living with compromise, dealing with mass taste and commercialism, negotiating the marketplace, and making personal sense of the mechanics and metaphysics of the business environment of art.
Many an artist grows bitter in this difficult arena. Many an artist flounders. Only the rare artist sits himself down to examine these matters, for they are painful to consider. But you have no choice but to examine them. If you are an artist, you want an audience. And if you want an audience, you must do business.
Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and Performing Artists
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barbararachkoscoloreddust.com 
Pearls from artists # 429
Nov 18
Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Vincent [van Gogh] found himself in perfect harmony with[Emile] Zola’s world view. Neither of them sugarcoated or idealized the harsh reality of the everyday life that surrounded them, or the subjects it offered up. The same reality was at the heart of both of their work. In July 1883, Vincent read Zola’s essay on art, ‘Le Moment artistique,’ contained in one of his critical works on literary and artistic life, Mes haines (My Hatreds), in which Zola reflected on a crucial aspect of artistic creativity, going beyond the word ‘realistic;’ ‘the word “realist” means nothing to me, and I declare reality subordinate to temperament.’ Therefore, according to Zola, a ‘work of art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.’ Vincent did not comment on this passage directly, but in his lines we see that in Zola’s words he found confirmation of his own beliefs. To Theo, in 1885, he wrote of his attempts to capture the effects of light in The Potato Eaters: “Not always literally exactly – rather never exactly – for one sees nature through one’s temperament.” The two contrasting souls that live side by side in the author of Les Rougon Macquart, one methodical, the other creative, reflected Vincent’s own creative approach.
Mariella Guzzoni in Vincent’s Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him
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Posted in 2020, An Artist's Life, Creative Process, Inspiration, Pearls from Artists, Quotes
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