Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 648
“Apparition,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58” x 38”
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
I prefer to speak in terms of the artist’s voice. Voice is deeper, manifested from the very core of your being. It is a synthesis of the experiences, intellectual concepts, and aesthetic interests you possess, executed in your distinctive way, in the formal, emotional, and intellectual language of your chosen medium. When successful, the realization of your voice follows a gestalt principle. The combination of your ideas and the work’s physical embodiment is greater than the sum of its parts and distinguishes your outcome from everyone else’s. If we wrote down a single concept and handed it to a dozen artists, we would get very different responses from each of them, and some works would be a stronger synthesis of ideas and execution. As Frank Stella once said, “There are no good ideas for paintings, there are only good paintings… the painting IS the idea (Saltz, 2020:42).”
The art that we recognize as having singular, identifying features, those formal aspects that allow us to immediately see a work as ‘a David Wojnarowicz’ or ‘a Julie Mehretu,’ were not the product of a singular flash of brilliance. These qualities evolved as part of a sustained, life-long, ever-deepening investigation to articulate their specific and singular vision. Our voice comes from tapping into the depths of our own consciousness, then distilling the most powerful aspects of that awareness. Voice also expands and deepens over time. It evolves along with the artist.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
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Pearls from artists* # 628
Beginning
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
We have nothing to go by, but still, we must begin. It requires chutzpah – the Yiddish word for that ineffable combination of courage and hubris – to put down one word, then another, perhaps even accumulate a couple of flimsy pages, so few that they don’t even firm the smallest of piles, and call it the beginning of a novel. Or memoir. Or story. Or anything, really rather than a couple of flimsy pages.
When I’m between books, I feel as if I will never have another story to tell. The last book has wiped me out, has taken everything from me, everything I understand and feel and know and remember, and … that’s it. There’s nothing left. A low-level depression sets in. The world hides its gifts from me. It has taken me years to realize that this feeling, the one of the well being empty, is as it should be. It means I’ve spent everything. And so I must begin again.
I wait.
I try to be patient. I remember Colette, who wrote that her most essential art was “not that of writing, but the domestic task of knowing how to wait, to conceal, to save up crumbs, to reglue, regild, change the worst into the not-so-bad, how to lose and recover in the same moment that frivolous thing, a taste for life.” Colette’s words, along with those of a few others, have migrated from one of my notebooks to another for over twenty years now. It’s wisdom I need to remember – wisdom that is easy to forget.
Dani Shapiro in Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
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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/
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Pearls from artists* # 390
In the studio. Photo: Izzy Nova
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
What made their work so unique and brilliant was that intangible element – self. Great painting, great art in general, is not about materials used or methods mastered or even talent possessed. It is a combination of all of these factors, and an individual driven by a force that seems outside them, toward expression of an idea they often do not understand.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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Pearls from artists* # 336
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.
Beauty and symbol are the two faces of the numinous, that enigmatic force that bestows upon certain things, places, and moments an otherworldly power. It is the combination of radical beauty and symbolic resonance – of apparition and death – that makes aesthetic objects so overpowering. While at the surface there may appear to be an insurmountable difference between a Shinto shrine and a Tom Waits concert, both use beauty and symbol to confront us with what is strange and sacred in life. Their similarity is as profound as their differences.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
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barbararachkoscoloreddust.com 