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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.
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Pearls from artists* # 377
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.
Life for an artist, any artist, was difficult. There were few rewards other than the most important, which was satisfying one’s need to create. But in the art world of galleries, collections, and museums that the avant-garde artists in New York would inherit in the late 1940s, the difficulties experienced by the men who painted and sculpted would be nothing compared to those of the women. Society might mock the men’s work and disparage them for being “bums,” but at least they were awarded the dignity of ridicule. Women had to fight with every fiber of their being not to be completely ignored. In a treatise on men and women in America published at the start of the war, author Pearl S. Buck wrote,
The talented woman… must have, besides their talent, an unusual energy which drives them… to exercise their own powers. Like talented men, they are single-minded creatures, and they can’t sink into idleness nor fritter away life and time, nor endure discontent. They possess that rarest gift, integrity of purpose… Such women sacrifice, without knowing they do, what many other women hold dear – amusement, society, play of one kind or another – to choose solitude and profound thinking and feeling, and at last final expression.
“To what end?” another woman might ask. To the end, perhaps… of art – art which has lifted us out of mental and spiritual savagery.”
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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