Blog Archives
Q: Is there a pastel painting that you are most proud of?
“She Embraced It and Grew Stronger,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58″ x 38,” 2003
A: Without a doubt I am most proud of “She Embraced It and Grew Stronger.”
After Bryan was killed on 9/11, making art again seemed an impossibility. When he was alive I would spend weeks setting up and lighting the tableau I wanted to paint. Then Bryan would shoot two negatives using his Toyo-Omega 4 x 5 view camera. I would select one and order a 20″ x 24″ reference photo to be printed by a local photography lab.
“She Embraced It…” is the first large pastel painting that I created without using a photograph taken by Bryan. This painting proved that I had learned to use his 4 x 5 view camera to shoot the reference photographs that were (and still are) integral to my process. My life’s work could continue!
Certainly the title is autobiographical. ‘She’ in “She Embraced It and Grew Stronger” is me and ‘It’ means continuing on without Bryan and living life for both of us.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 170
Barbara at work, Photo: Marianne Barcellona
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Every novelist ought to invent his own technique, that is the fact of the matter. Every novel worthy of the name is like another planet, whether large or small, which has its own laws just as it has its own flora and fauna. Thus, Faulkner’s technique is certainly the best one with which to produce Faulkner’s world, and Kafka’s nightmare has produced its own myths that make it communicable. Benjamin Constant, Stendahl, Eugene Fromentin, Jaques Riviere, Radiquet, all used different techniques, took different liberties, and set themselves different tasks. The work of art itself, whether its title is Adolphe, Lucien Leuwen, Dominique, Le Diable au corps or A la Recherché du temps perdu, is the solution to the problem of technique.
Francois Mauriac in The Paris Review Interviews: Writers at Work 1st Series, edited and with an Introduction by Malcolm Cowley
Comments are welcome!
Q: Do you have any favorites among the Mexican and Guatemalan folk art figures that you depict in your work?
Idea for an upcoming pastel painting
A: I suppose it seems that way, since I certainly paint some figures more than others. My favorite characters change, depending on what is happening in my work. My current favorites are a figure I have never painted before (the Balinese dragon above) and several Mexican and Guatemalan figures last painted years ago. All will make an appearance in a pastel painting for which I am still developing preliminary ideas (above).
Comments are welcome!
Q: If you knew that you would never sell another pastel painting, would you still make them?
Preliminary sketch and photo
A: This is an interesting question to ponder in August when the art world is on vacation.
Certainly I would continue (reread my blog post of July 25th), but I wouldn’t bother to make them if one unrelated thing were true: that I knew beforehand what they would look like. Then the process just wouldn’t be very interesting.
Each pastel painting is an exploration, a journey with a point of departure. My reference photo and preliminary sketch serve as guides, but creating a painting is like making a voyage with only the roughest of maps. As I work, new possibilities open up that take the painting – and me – to places that could not have been imagined.
Comments are welcome!
Q: How do you think living in New York affects your work?
Lower Manhattan
A: Arguably, life in New York provides an artist with direct access to some of the best international art of the past, the present, and probably the future. It is possible to see more art here – both good and bad – than in any other American city.
Just pick up any local magazine and scan the art listings! Our problem is never that there isn’t anything interesting to see or do. It’s “how do we zero in on the most significant local cultural activities, ones that might contribute to making us better artists?”
Certainly a visual artist’s work is consciously and unconsciously influenced not only by what she sees in museums and galleries, but by walking around the city. That’s partly why I am an inveterate walker. I never know what amazing things I am going to see when I leave my apartment.
Although living in New York City is a rich and heady mix for anyone, it is more so for sensitive artists. Artists are virtual sponges, soaking up experiences, processing them, and mysteriously expressing them in our work.
New York lets an artist ponder excellence as we see and experience firsthand what is possible. The best of the best manages to make its way here.
Undoubtedly, my own work is richer for having spent the last eighteen years in this fascinating, wild, and crazy city. For a visual artist New York is an infinitely fascinating place to live.
Comments are welcome!
Q: Why don’t you teach or conduct pastel workshops?
Barbara in her studio
A: I am often asked to teach, but I never have had the desire to do so. Because my work is extremely labor intensive, I am reluctant to give up precious studio time, either for teaching or for any activities that could be deemed a distraction. Consistent in my creative practice, I typically work in my studio five days a week, seven or more hours a day and am able to complete four or five pastel-on-sandpaper paintings in a year.
Teaching would divert time, attention, and energy away from my practice. Certainly it can be rewarding in many ways but since my process is slow and meticulous, I prefer to focus on making new work.
Comments are welcome!
Q: So much of the art one sees in New York is ugly, but your art is consistently beautiful. Is beauty important to you?
Barbara’s studio
A: Yes, beauty is extremely important. In some art circles it is not fashionable to say so, but I completely agree with the photographer, Robert Adams, who writes, “… the goal of art is Beauty.” I’ll leave it to others to decide if this quality is reached in my pastel paintings, but I certainly strive towards it.
Comments are welcome!
Q: Do you have any essential words that you live by?
Studio wall
A: I certainly do! When I left the active duty Navy in 1989, my co-workers threw a farewell party. One of the parting gifts I received was a small plaque from Tina Greene, a young enlisted woman whom I had supervised. The words on the plaque deeply resonated with me, since I was about to make a significant, risky, and scary career change. It was the perfect gift for someone facing the uncertainty of an art career.
Many years later Tina’s plaque is still a proud possession of mine. It is hanging on the wall behind my easel, to be read every day as I work. It says:
“Excellence can be attained if you…
Care more than others think is wise…
Risk more than others think is safe…
Dream more than others think is practical…
Expect more than others think is possible.”
Comments are welcome!
Q: I have been always fascinated with the re-contexualizing power of Art and with the way some objects or even some concepts often gain a second life when they are “transduced” on a canvas or in a block of marble. So I would like to ask you if in your opinion, personal experience is an absolutely indespensable part of a creative process. Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?
Barbara’s studio
A: Certainly personal experience is an indispensable and inseparable part of the creative process. For me art and life are one and I suspect that is true for most artists. When I look at each of my pastel paintings I can remember what was going on in my life at the time I made it. Each is a sort of veiled autobiography waiting to be decoded and in a way, each is also a time-capsule of the larger zeitgeist. It’s still a mystery how exactly this happens but all lived experience – what’s going on in the world, books I’m reading and thinking about, movies I’ve seen that have stayed with me, places I’ve visited, etc. – overtly and/or not so obviously, finds its way into the work.
Life experience also explains why the work I do now is different from my work even five years ago. In many ways I am not the same person.
The inseparableness of art and life is one reason that travel is so important to my creative process. Artists always seek new influences that will enrich and change our work. To be an artist, indeed to be alive, is to never stop learning and growing.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 105
“Blind Faith,” 38″ x 58″, soft pastel on sandpaper
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Serendipitously, I read two memoirs in close proximity, Julia Child’s account of her life in France and how she learned to be a first-rate cook, and Renee Fleming’s story of becoming a world-class opera diva. While there were many differences between the women and the skills they set out to master, I was struck in both books by how extraordinarily hard each one worked in private for years and years before going public, certainly before becoming famous, and how each managed shame. Both women loved what they did and thus brought to bear a similar, and I suspect key, willingness to stay with their efforts through eons of study, practice, and improvement. Both had the ability to hear criticism and to make corrections repeatedly without becoming terminally discouraged; to bear the anxiety of their efforts; neither was too proud to learn and keep learning. This willingness to be taught and corrected, without feeling ashamed, sometimes over and over again, is a huge asset when you are seeking to do something very well. And one way shame impedes people is by making them take criticism too personally – as about them rather than about what they’re trying to learn.
Janna Malamud Smith in An Absorbing Errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Mastery
Comments are welcome!
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