Blog Archives
Q: Love your selection of pastels! Do you have favorites that you need to force yourself not to continually return to? (Question from Donina Asera via Facebook)
A: No, I don’t think so. Certainly, I do have general preferences. I prefer dark, vivid, intense colors so many of my pale pastels go mostly unused. The single pastel that I use most is Rembrandt black – I buy them buy the dozens – because it takes many layers of pigment to achieve my dark black backgrounds. Otherwise, I strive to be open to whatever the painting needs. My goal – always! – is to make a pastel painting that is exciting to look at and different from anything I have created before.
Thank you very much for the great question!
Comments are welcome!
Q: Can you explain how you choose colors? (Question from Maria Cox via Instagram)
A: I am wild about color! As I work to create a pastel painting, I apply a color, back up from my easel to see how it interacts with and affects the rest of the painting, and then I make revisions. This process necessitates countless color changes and hundreds of hours during months of work. I apply pastel using a meticulous layering process. Were you to x-ray one of them, the earlier, discarded versions of a pastel painting would be visible. All the while I carefully fine-tune and refine how the colors and shapes interact with each other.
The goal is to make an exciting painting that no one, especially me as the maker, has ever seen before. I have no desire to repeat myself, to make art that resembles work by any other artist, or to be forced into a niche.
I try to select intense, vibrant colors that are exciting to look at, that work well in relationship to each other, and that will grab the viewer. Sometimes I deliberately choose colors for their symbolic meanings. For example, I selected a dark purple for the alternating triangles (the ones with the pink dots above) in “Overlord” because purple denotes royalty.
I have been working with soft pastel for 37 years so I have a fairly intricate science of color at my disposal. No doubt, many unconscious factors are at play, too. More on that in future posts.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 519
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Because the arts are the products of a process that stands apart from so much of our social, economic, and political life, they move us and excite us unlike anything else in our lives. When we rush to label them – as radical, conservative, liberal, gay,straight, feminist, Black, or white – we may describe a part of what they are, but we’ve failed to account for their freestanding value. And without that the arts are nothing. The artist in the act of creation – working through particular words, sounds, colors, shapes, and their infinite combinations – almost inevitably risks irrelevance. But the decision to reject doing in favor of making, which some have described as a retreat into self-absorption and narcissism, is in fact an act of courage. Artists reenter the world by sending the work that they’ve made back into the world, where it lives on – independent, inviolable – in what Auden called ”the valley of its making.” That is a place apart – paradoxically, triumphantly apart.
Jed Perl in Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts
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Q: When did you start using the sandpaper technique and why (Question from “Arte Realizzata”)
A: In the late 1980s when I was studying at the Art League School in Alexandria, VA, I enrolled in a three-day pastel workshop with Albert Handel, an artist known for his southwest landscapes in pastel and oil paint. I had just begun working with soft pastel and was experimenting with paper. Handel suggested I try Ersta fine sandpaper. I did and nearly three decades later, I’ve never used anything else.
This paper is acid-free and accepts dry media, mainly pastel and charcoal. It allows me to build up layer upon layer of pigment and blend, without having to use a fixative. The tooth of the paper almost never gets filled up so it continues to hold pastel. (On the rare occasion when the tooth DOES fill up, which sometimes happens with problem areas that are difficult to resolve, I take a bristle paintbrush, dust off the unwanted pigment, and start again). My entire technique – slowly applying soft pastel, blending and creating new colors directly on the paper, making countless corrections and adjustments, rendering minute details, looking for the best and/or most vivid colors – evolved in conjunction with this paper.
I used to say that if Ersta ever went out of business and stopped making sandpaper, my artist days would be over. Thankfully, when that DID happen, UArt began making a very similar paper. I buy it in two sizes – 22″ x 28″ sheets and 56″ wide by 10-yard-long rolls. The newer version of the rolled paper is actually better than the old, because when I unroll it, it lays flat immediately. With Ersta I would lay the paper out on the floor for weeks before the curl would give way and it was flat enough to work on.
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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 does a pastel feel like in your hand?
With “Prophecy,” 70” x 50,” at Westbeth Gallery
A: Each manufacturer uses distinct binders to hold the raw pigment together to form a pastel stick. Due mainly to this binder, each pastel feels slightly different. Rembrandts are medium-hard and I generally use them for the first few layers. The black backgrounds of my pastel paintings are achieved by layering lots of Rembrandt black.
I enjoy using Unison because they feel “buttery” as I apply them to the sandpaper. If you’ve been to my studio, you know that I use just about every soft pastel there is! Believe it or not, no two are the same color.
Each pastel has its own qualities and some are harder or more waxy than others. Henri Roche has the widest range of colors and they’re gorgeous! I want them to show so I use them for the final layer, the ‘icing on the cake.”
Comments are welcome!
Q: Would you speak about the meaning of your work and the different materials you use?
About half of Barbara’s pastels
A: It is as difficult to explain the meaning of my art as it is to interpret the meaning of life! I am invested in and concerned with process: foreign travel, prodigious reading, devotion to craft, months of slow meticulous work in the studio trying to create an exciting work of art that has never been seen before, etc. I love making pastel paintings! Many years ago I challenged myself to push the limits of what soft pastel can achieve. I am still doing so.
I leave it to others – viewers, arts writers, critics, art historians – to study my creative journey and talk about meanings. I believe an artist is inspired to create and viewers ponder the creation. I would not presume to tell anyone how to react to my work.
For many years I have been devoted to promoting soft pastel as a fine art medium. There are excellent reasons it has been around for five hundred years! It is the most permanent of media. There’s no liquid binder to cause oxidizing or cracking over time, as happens with oil paint. Pastel colors are intense because they are close to being pure pigment. Pastel allows direct application (no brushes) with no drying time and no color changes.
I use UArt acid-free sandpaper. This is not sandpaper from a hardware store. It is made for artists who work in pastel and allows me to build up layers of pigment without using a fixative. My process – slowly applying and layering pastels, blending and mixing new colors directly on the paper, making countless adjustments, searching for the best and/or most vivid colors – continually evolves. Each pastel painting takes months to create.
Comments are welcome!
What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: This is my fourth day working on a small (26”x 20”) pastel painting. All of these colors are going to change over the next few months.
Comments are welcome!
Q: Please speak a little about the history of pastel.
Some of Barbara’s soft pastels
A: Pastel has been in use for five hundred years. Its invention is attributed to the German painter, Johann Thiele, in the 16th century, followed by Venetian artist, Rosalba Carriera, who was the first to use it consistently. Edgar Degas, the most prolific user of pastel and its great champion, was followed by many artists who used varying techniques.
Degas’ subject matter included ballet dancers, laundresses, milliners, and denizens of the Parisian demimonde. The pure hues of pastel, plus its direct application, made it his preferred medium. Rosalba Carriera, a much-admired portrait artist, revolutionized the world of pastel by developing a wider range of colors, expanding pastel’s availability and usefulness. Mary Cassatt’s pastel portraits of children and family life provided her with a steady income while living in Paris. American painter William Merritt Chase used pastel to explore plein air painting. Pastel’s portability and rich colors made it ideal for outdoor landscapes and for capturing light.
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Q: You use an impressive assortment of soft pastels to create your pastel paintings. Which are your favorite?
Barbara’s studio
A: My favorite brand of soft pastels is Henri Roché. They offer subtle variations in color and hue since they make more colors than any other company.
As a birthday present a few years ago, I treated myself to a full 750-color set. I mainly use them for finishing touches, rather than letting them get buried under pastel. At nearly $20 a stick, I also don’t want see them reduced to colored dust on the floor beneath my easel. One of my peers calls them, “the Maserati of pastels!”
Isobel Roché told me that her goal is to reach 1000 colors in time for the company’s 300th anniversary in 2020! I hope she makes it.
These pastels have been around so long that Degas and other artists of the era used them. It’s humbling to know that I am working with the same materials and following a long and prestigious art tradition of using soft pastel.
Comments are welcome!
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