Blog Archives
Q: Can you give us your current elevator pitch?
Discussing Bolivian masks with Nika, Photo: David De Hannay
A: Here it is:
I am a New York visual artist, blogger, and author. For thirty-four years I have been creating original pastel-on-sandpaper paintings that depict my large collection of Mexican and Guatemalan folk art – masks, carved wooden animals, papier mache figures, and toys. “Bolivianos,” my current series, is based on a mask exhibition I saw and photographed in La Paz in 2017 at the National Museum of Folklore and Ethnography.
My technique is self-invented and involves applying dozens of layers of soft pastel onto acid-free sandpaper to create new colors directly on the paper. Each pastel painting takes several months to complete. Typically, I make four or five each year. I achieve extraordinarily rich, vibrant color in pastel paintings that are a unique combination of reality, fantasy, and autobiography.
My background is unusual for an artist. I am a pilot, a retired Navy Commander, and a 9/11 widow. Besides making art, I am a published blogger and author best known for my popular blog, “Barbara Rachko’s Colored Dust” (53,000+ subscribers!) and my eBook, “From Pilot to Painter,” on Amazon and iTunes.
Please see images and more at http://barbararachko.art/en/
Comments are welcome!
Q: What is your favorite art museum?
The Great Hall at the Met
A: My favorite art museum is the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The Met is peerless! The breadth and quality of the collection is nearly inexhaustible. It’s my library, the place I go to for inspiration and to deepen and broaden my knowledge of art. The Met is a treasure for every working artist.
Comments are welcome!
Q: Besides your art materials is there something you couldn’t live without in your studio?
Barbara’s studio
A: I would not want to work without music. Turning on the radio or the cd player is part of my daily ritual before heading over to the easel. (Next I apply barrier cream to my hands to prevent pastel being absorbed into my skin, put on a surgical mask, etc.). I generally listen to WFUV, WBGO, or to my cd collection while I’m working.
Listening and thinking about song lyrics is integral to my art-making process. How this works exactly may be a topic to explore in a future blog post.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 184
“Couple,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 20″ x 26″
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Do the poet and scientist not work analogously? Both are willing to waste effort. To be hard on himself is one of the main strengths of each. Each is attentive to clues, each must narrow the choice, must strive for perfection. As George Grosz says, “In art there is no place for gossip and but a small place for the satirist.” The objective is fertile procedure. Is it not? Jacob Bronkowski says in the Saturday Evening Post that science is not a mere collection of discoveries, but that science is the process of discovering. In any case it’s not established once and for all; it’s evolving.
Marianne Moore in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews Second Series
Comments are welcome!
Q: Would you say there is a unifying quality to all of the work you have produced in the last thirty years?
Barbara’s portfolio book
A: Yes, I can think of several. Whether making pastel paintings or printing photographs in the darkroom, I have always been concerned with quality and craftsmanship and never pronounce a work finished until it is the best thing I can make.
Although I started out as a maker of photorealist portraits in pastel, for twenty-odd years I have worked with Mexican folk art as my primary subject matter, treating these objects very differently in three separate series: “Black Paintings,” “Domestic Threats,” and “Gods and Monsters.” The first two are pastel-on-sandpaper paintings while the last is comprised of chromogenic photographs (c-prints). A few years ago I also started making “Teleidoscopes” using an iPad app to photograph my Mexican and Guatemalan folk art collection. This last one is just for fun; I do not offer them for sale.
Soft pastel is my first love and the two series of pastel paintings are my best-known work. My technique for using pastel continues to evolve in intriguing ways. I doubt I can ever learn all there is to know not only about color, but also about this medium. Pastel is endlessly fascinating, which is why I have never wanted to switch to anything else.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 139
“Broken,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Leaving a show of Pat Steir’s work called Winter Paintings at Cheim & Read Gallery, I thought back some years to when the Walker Art Center’s then curator Richard Flood was walking us through the Center’s collection and we came upon an abstract expressionist painting by Joan Mitchell that was so striking I asked him why it had taken so long for her to be recognized. He answered with a wry expression: “It’s the problem of beauty!”
A few days earlier our friends Kol and Dash came to lunch at our home, and Dash said at this time most visual art is conceptual. “It’s a way of thinking,” she said.
Story/Time: The Life of an Idea/Bill T. Jones
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 113
Studio corner
* 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 Amsterdam I saw a striking still life painted by Rembrandt van Rijn suspended above a glass case that contained the same objects that he used as a model for the picture. The contrast between what felt like a drab collection of random objects in the case and the stunning luminescent painting that seemed imbued with nothing less than intense energy and life gave me pause and clarified something I had been thinking about. I had been thinking about the power of art to transform the frustrations and irritations of daily life into a realm of grace and to embody, through arrangement, composition, light, color and shade, nothing less than the secret elixir of life itself.
We encounter daily frustrations, irritations, and obstacles. Perhaps we feel hampered and limited by our hit-and-miss upbringing, our apparent limitations and our imperfect ongoing circumstances. And yet Rembrandt’s still life painting demonstrates that it is within our power to transform the random, the everyday, the frustrating and the prosaic into an arrangement instilled with grace and poetry. Is it the arrangement of these objects that lends such a spiritual quality to the painting? Is it the sensation of light captured upon canvas? How did Rembrandt transform the quotidian into an uplifting vision of life?
Anne Bogart in What’s the Story: Essays about art, theater, and storytelling
Comments are welcome!
Q: How large is your collection of Mexican folk art objects?
Part of the collection
A: I haven’t counted them, but my guess is 200 pieces of various sizes. This includes the Guatemalan figures. I went to Guatemala in 2009 and 2010. Since I divide my time between a house in Alexandria, VA, an apartment in Manhattan, and a studio in Chelsea, part of my folk art collection is in each of these places.
barbararachkoscoloreddust.com 