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Pearls from artists* # 90

Walking on Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

While it is not true that only artists understand art, for there are in every generation some people who not only understand it but also enhance its reach by appreciation, there is a freemasonry among us. We stand shoulder to shoulder, generation to generation.

Anne Truitt in Turn: The Journal of an Artist

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Posted in 2014, An Artist's Life, Art in general, Inspiration, Pearls from Artists, Photography, Quotes, Travel

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Pearls from artists* # 89

Apr 30

Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust

Some of Barbara’s pastels

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

Dear Diary:

On a drifty Manhattan stroll
The kind that unearths magical treasures
I made a right turn off of Houston
Onto Bowery
And as it became Third Avenue
I came upon this old art store
That creaked hello
Its warped wooden shelves
Held new paints
A little dusty from the old building
But whose colors were deeper
Than I’d ever seen before

And at the back of the store
Up a narrow stairway
Was a tiny room
And behind a long table stood three people
(Probably artists)
Who could get me any paper I desired
Paper with designs
To collage with
Hot press, cold press
100 gram, 600 gram paper
To draw and paint on
Any kind of paper I’d ever want
Templates from heaven

And over my right shoulder
Was a tall window
Overlooking the glorious city
That has held this little room
Tenderly in its arms
All these years

And as I hugged
My rolled up package of paper
And went back downstairs
The old stairs seemed to gently whisper
“Come back soon,
We’ll keep each other alive”

And stepping outside
Third Avenue seemed more spacious
And I took a deep breath
As the world
Kaleidoscoped
With possibilities
Lovingly wrapped up
By three kind artists
At the top of the world.

“Art Supplies From Heaven,“ by Judith Ellen Sanders, published in “Metropolitan Diary,” NY Times, April 6, 2014

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Posted in 2014, An Artist's Life, Art in general, Creative Process, Inspiration, New York, NY, Painting in General, Pastel Painting, Pearls from Artists, Photography, Quotes, Studio, Working methods

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Pearls from artists* # 88

Apr 23

Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust

Teotihuacan

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

To men like Ayers, it occurs to me, this temple is civilization. The masses, slaves, peasants, and foot soldiers exist in the cracks of its flagstones, ignorant even of their ignorance. Not so the great statesmen, scientists, artists, and most of all, the composers of the age, any age, who are civilization’s architects, masons, and priests. Ayers sees our role is to make civilization ever more resplendent. My employer’s profoundest, or only, wish is to create a minaret that inheritors of Progress a thousand years from now will point to and say, “Look, there is Vyvyan Ayers!”

How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one’s throat all the sooner.

David Mitchell in Cloud Atlas

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Posted in 2014, An Artist's Life, Art in general, Creative Process, Inspiration, Mexico, Pearls from Artists, Photography, Quotes, Travel

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Pearls from artists* # 72

Jan 1

Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust

Boulder, CO

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

Art is a process and a journey. All artists have to find a way to lie to themselves, find ways to fool themselves into believing that what they’re doing is good enough, the best they can do at that moment, and that’s ok. Every work of art falls short of what the artist envisioned. It is precisely that gap between their intention and their execution that opens up the door for the next work.

Eric Fischl and Michael Stone in Bad Boy: My Life on and off the Canvas

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Posted in 2014, An Artist's Life, Art in general, Creative Process, Inspiration, Painting in General, Pearls from Artists, Photography, Quotes, Travel

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Pearls from artists* # 70

Dec 11

Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust

New York, NY

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

Ultimately, whether you like a photograph or not, it has a history behind it. When people look at a photograph, they want to believe in its authenticity, that they’re looking at something special that can’t be repeated. The artist’s eye, the photographer’s eye, has created a moment of truth by pushing the button on the camera. The issue is not that the moment is separate from the rest of the photograph; it is the element that links what’s happening to the rest of the image, and the photographer creates a higher meaning, a higher sensibility, in that instant. That’s difficult to achieve for most people who are involved in photography as artists. It’s an essential part of basic photography that’s learned on the street and in traditional ways that people used to do photography.

Roger Ballen in Lines, Marks, and Drawings: Through the Lens of Roger Ballen

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Posted in 2013, An Artist's Life, Art in general, Creative Process, Inspiration, New York, NY, Pearls from Artists, Photography, Quotes

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Q: Can you talk about the studios you have worked in over the years?

Jan 26

Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust

Studio entrance

A: From the beginning in the mid-1980’s I had a studio. My first one was in the spare bedroom of the Alexandria, Virginia, house that I shared with Bryan and that I still own. For about three years in the 1990s I had a studio on the third floor of the Torpedo Factory Art Center, a building in Alexandria that is open to the public; people come in and watch the artists work. In 1997 an opportunity to move to New York arose and I didn’t look back. By then I was showing in a good 57th Street gallery, Brewster Arts Ltd. (the gallery focused exclusively on Latin American artists; I was thrilled with the company I was in; the only fellow non-Latina represented by owner, Mia Kim, was Leonora Carrington), and I had managed to find a New York agent, Leah Poller, with whom to collaborate. I looked at one other space before finding my West 29th Street studio, where I still work. It was and continues to be my oasis in a chaotic city, a place to make art, to read, and to think. I feel more calm the moment I walk in.

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Posted in 2013, An Artist's Life, Art Works in Progress, Black Paintings, New York, NY, Pastel Painting, Studio

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Pearls from artists* # 23

Jan 16

Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust

LACMA

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

My composition arises out of asking questions. I am reminded of a story early on about a class with Schoenberg. He had us go to the blackboard to solve a particular problem in counterpoint (though it was a class in harmony). He said, “When you have a solution, turn around and let me see it.” I did that. He then said, “Now another solution, please.” I gave another and another until finally, having made seven or eight, I reflected a moment and then said with some certainty, “There aren’t any more solutions.” He said, “OK. What is the principle underlying all the solutions?” I couldn’t answer his question; but I had always worshiped the man, and at that point I did even more. He ascended, so to speak. I spent the rest of my life, until recently, hearing him ask that question over and over. And then it occurred to me through the direction that my work has taken, which is renunciation of choices and the substitution of asking questions, that the principle underlying all of the solutions that I had given him was the question that he had asked, because they certainly didn’t come from any other point. He would have accepted that answer, I think. The answers have the questions in common. Therefore the question underlies the answers.

John Cage quoted in Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists

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Posted in 2013, An Artist's Life, Art in general, Creative Process, Pearls from Artists, Quotes

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Q: Would you talk about some of your early experiences with art?

Jan 12

Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust

Zebras in Chelsea

A: I grew up in a blue collar family in suburban New Jersey. My father was a television repairman for RCA. For awhile my mother worked as a sewing machine operator in a factory that made women’s undergarments, but mostly she stayed home to raise my sister and me (at the time I had only one sister, Denise; Michele was born much later). My parents were both first-generation Americans and in those days no one in my extended family had gone to college. I was a smart kid and showed some artistic talent in kindergarten or earlier. I have always been able to draw anything, as long as I can see it (i.e., I require a visual reference as opposed to drawing from memory). I remember copying the Sunday comics, which in those days appeared in all the newspapers. At the age of 6 my mother enrolled Denise and me in Saturday morning painting classes at the studio of an artist named Frances Hulmes in Rutherford, NJ. I continued the classes for about 8 years and became a fairly adept oil painter. Living just 12 miles from New York City in Clifton, New jersey, my mother often took us to museums, particularly the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Natural History. I remember falling in love with Rousseau’s “The Sleeping Gypsy” and being astonished by the violence and scale of Picasso’s “Guernica,” when it was on long-term loan to MoMA. I have fond memories of studying the dioramas at the Museum of Natural History. They are still my favorite part of the museum. I suppose it goes without saying that there were not any artists in my family so I had no role models. At the age of 15 my father decided that art was not a serious pursuit – he said it was a hobby, not a profession – so he abruptly stopped paying for my Saturday morning lessons. With no financial or moral support to pursue art, I turned my attention to other interests (ex. I learned to fly airplanes, becoming a commercial pilot and Boeing 727 flight engineer) and let my artistic abilities lie dormant.

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Posted in 2013, An Artist's Life

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Q: Do you listen to music while you work?

Dec 29

Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust

A corner of the studio

A: I always have the stereo on when I work in my studio, either tuned in to WBGO (the Newark-based jazz station), WNYC (for news and talk radio; Leonard Lopate, Fresh Air, etc.), WFMU (Fordham University’s radio station, to learn what college kids are listening to) and other local radio stations. I still listen to cd’s, I read the lyrics and the liner notes, and I prefer to listen to music the way artists intended it, meaning that I listen to entire albums from start to finish instead of jumping around between single tracks by different artists. When it comes to music, I’m interested in everything: jazz (especially classic jazz artists like Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Art Blakely, etc.), blues, classical, pop, rock, world music (especially artists from Brazil, Cuba, and any country in Africa), electronic, indy, experimental, ancient music, etc. You name it, I probably listen to it, and if I don’t, I’m eager to learn all about it. When I’m working, certain artists are better to listen to at particular points in a painting. For example, one of my favorite artists to start a new painting with is Lady Gaga. The beat, her energy, and sheer exuberance are perfect when I’m standing in front of my easel with a blank piece of sandpaper in front of me. Gaga’s music gets me moving and working fast, putting down colors instinctively without thinking about them, just feeling everything.

It’s a different story when I am at my apartment and am shooting a photo setup. Then I might or might not listen to music. Lately it’s more about working fast (I shoot 24 images in about 15 minutes), choosing a variety of interesting vantage points, getting surprising effects, etc.

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Posted in 2012, Art Works in Progress, Black Paintings, Creative Process, Pastel Painting, Photography, Studio, Working methods

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Pearls from artists* # 12

Oct 31

Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust

Grand Falls, AZ

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

People who set their sails into art tend to work very hard. They train themselves in school; they practice and they read and they think and they talk. But for most of them there seems to be a more or less conscious cutoff point. It can be a point in time: “I will work until I am twenty-one (twenty-five, thirty, or forty).” Or a point in effort: “I will work three hours a day (or eight or ten).” Or a point in pleasure: “I will work unless…” and here the “enemies of promise” harry the result. These are personal decisions, more or less of individual will. They depend on the scale of values according to which artists organize their lives. Artists have a modicum of control. Their development is open-ended. As the pressure of their work demands more and more of them. they can stretch to meet it. They can be open to themselves, and as brave as they can be to see who they are, what their work is teaching them. This is never easy. Every step forward is a clearing through a thicket of reluctance and habit and natural indolence. And all the while they are at the mercy of events. They may have a crippling accident, or may find themselves yanked into a lifelong responsibility such as the necessity to support themselves and their families. Or a war may wipe out the cultural context on which they depend. Even the most fortunate have to adjust the demands of a personal obsession to the demands of daily life.

Anne Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist

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Posted in 2012, An Artist's Life, Inspiration, Pearls from Artists, Quotes, Studio

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Blog Archives

Pearls from artists* # 90

Pearls from artists* # 89

Pearls from artists* # 88

Pearls from artists* # 72

Pearls from artists* # 70

Q: Can you talk about the studios you have worked in over the years?

Pearls from artists* # 23

Q: Would you talk about some of your early experiences with art?

Q: Do you listen to music while you work?

Pearls from artists* # 12

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