Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 656
At Storm King Art Center, Cornwall-On-Hudson, NY. Photo: Susan Erlichman
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
The world needs artists more than they know, and you are entitled to be one of them. We altruistically create gifts, with no assurance those gifts will be appreciated. Like social workers, we do not make a lot of money, but we improve the quality of people’s lives through ripple effects. When our work shifts the perceptions of one viewer, the transformation often radiates to others around them. That includes dialogue and pushes the world toward more truth or justice and inspires others to do the same.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
Comments are welcome!
Q: Is there anything you wish you could change about life as a visual artist?
Barbara’s Studio
A: While there is much to admire and maybe even envy about being an artist, it does have some downsides. Among these, for me, is that enormous amounts of solitude are required to create art. I wish this were not the case.
Our work is entirely unique and because it starts as an idea in our heads, we must work solo to bring it into the world. We spend our days pondering, looking, and reacting, rather than speaking to anyone. As typical workdays go, it is rather odd.
I sometimes envy filmmakers who require collaboration with a large team of experts in order to practice their art. They have fellow professionals with whom they can discuss their ideas and they can solicit advice on how to make improvements. Artists rarely have this luxury.
On the other hand, visual artists don’t have to wait for anyone else to do their jobs before we can get to work. We don’t have to deal with personality conflicts or other people’s agendas. Our individual creative process is generally free of obstacles created by others. When you really think about it, the only thing that is required of an artist is to go to the studio and get to work! We are free to make our own rules and our own schedules, and, creatively speaking, are largely responsible for our own advances and setbacks.
Comments are welcome!
Q: How has photography changed your approach to painting?
Untitled chromogenic print, 24″ x 24″ on 30″ x 40″ Fujicolor crystal archives paper, edition of 5
A: From the beginning in the 1980s I used photographs as reference material and my late husband, Bryan, would shoot 4” x 5” negatives of my elaborate setups using his Toyo-Omega view camera. In those days I rarely picked up a camera except when we were traveling.
After Bryan was killed on 9/11, I inherited his extensive camera collection – old Nikons, Leicas, Graphlex cameras, etc. – and I wanted to learn how to use them. Starting in 2002 I enrolled in a series of photography courses (about 10 over 4 years) at the International Center of Photography in New York. I learned how to use all of Bryan’s cameras and how to make my own big color prints in the darkroom.
Along the way I discovered that the sense of composition and color I had developed over many years as a painter translated well into photography. The camera was just another medium with which to express my ideas. Astonishingly, in 2009 I had my first solo photography exhibition in New York.
It’s wonderful to be both a painter and a photographer. Pastel painting will always be my first love, but photography lets me explore ideas much faster than I ever could as a painter. Paintings take months of work. Photographs – from the initial impulse to create a setup to hanging a framed chromogenic print on the wall – can be made in minutes.
Comments are welcome!
Q: How do you persist despite the haters, nay-sayers, etc.? (Question from Bold Journey Publishing)
Barbara’s Studio
A: There are so many obstacles to art-making and countless reasons to just give up. When you really think about it, it’s amazing that great art gets made at all. So why do we do it? For artists I believe it’s all about making our time on earth matter, about devotion to our innate gifts, and a deep love of our hard-fought creative process.
I have been a full-time professional artist for 37 years. How and why do successful artists persist? It helps a lot to be stubborn! We just keep digging in that much deeper. Making art is a most noble and sacred calling – you know this if you are one of the called – and that’s what separates those of us who are in it for the long haul from the wimps, fakers, and hangers-on. I say to my fellow artists who continue to work despite the endless challenges, we artists who continue to struggle every day for recognition of our gifts are true heroes!
These words below by Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women, published in 2017, ring true for artists. It’s good, even for me, to occasionally reread them and be reminded.
The obstacles faced by women who hoped to leave a mark on humankind have, through the millennium, varied in height but not in stubborn persistence. And yet, a great many women have stubbornly ignored them. The desire to put words on a page or marks on a canvas was greater than the accrued social forces that told them they had no right to do so, that they were excluded by their gender from that priestly class called artist. The reason, according to Western tradition, was as old as creation itself: For many, God was the original artist and society had assigned its creator a gender – He. The woman who dared to declare herself an artist in defiance of centuries of such unwavering belief required monstrous strength, to fight not for equal recognition and reward but for something at once more basic and vital: her very life. Her art was her life. Without it, she was nothing. Having no faith that society would broaden its views on artists by dethroning men and accommodating women, in 1928 [Virginia] Woolf offered her fellow writers and painters a formula for survival that allowed them to create, if not with acceptance, then at least unimpeded. A woman artist, she said, needed but two possessions: “money and a room of her own.”
Furthermore, I think I persist because I do not believe in “big breaks.” Big breaks may sometimes happen, but in my experience an artist’s life is made up of single-minded dedication, persistence, hard work, and lots of small breaks. I recently finished reading “Failing Up: How to Take Risks, Aim Higher, and Never stop Learning” by Leslie Odom, Jr. I like what he has to say to artists here:
The biggest break is the one you give yourself by choosing to believe in your wisdom, in what you love, and in the gifts you have to offer the waiting world.
Comments are welcome!
Q: What do you like most about being an artist?
Entrance to Barbara’s studio
A: I love walking into my studio in the morning, knowing that I will spend the day doing what I love, using all my talents, skills, and experience to solve whatever problems lie ahead in the work. As artists we create our own tasks and then go about solving them. Yes, the day to day challenges are significant, but having the freedom to do meaningful work that we love is priceless.
When I was a Lieutenant in the Navy working at the Pentagon, I was very unhappy (and one doesn’t just give two weeks notice and leave the Navy behind)! I still remember what it was like having a soul-crushing job. I am grateful for this turn in my life journey. How much better life is as a professional artist!
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 579
New York, NY
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
An empirical fact about our lives is that we do not and cannot know what will happen a day or a moment in advance. The unexpected awaits us at every turn and every breath. The future is a vast perpetually regenerated mystery and the more we live and know, the greater the mystery. When we drop the blinders of our preconceptions, we are virtually propelled by every circumstance into the present time and the present mind: the moment, the whole moment, and nothing but the moment. This is a state of mind taught and strengthened by improvisation, a state of mind in which the here and now is not some trendy idea but a matter of life and death, upon which we can learn to reliably depend. We can depend on the world being a perpetual surprise in general motion and a perpetual invitation to create.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 570
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.
One of the main differences between the young girl who drew a line in chalk from the Metropolitan Museum all the way to her home on Park Avenue and the young woman who drew lines on canvas and paper twenty years later was that the latter understood the willfulness that drove the child. She was facing “the monster,” the consuming need to create, which was beyond her control but no longer beyond her comprehension. Helen [Frankenthaler] had long understood that her gift set her apart, and that it would be nearly impossible to describe how and why without sounding arrogant or cruel. “It’s saying I’m different, I’m special, consider me differently,” she explained years later. “And it’s also on the other side, a recognition that one is lonely, that one is not run of the mill, that the values are different, and yet we all go into the same supermarkets… and we are all moved one way or another by children and seasons, and dreams. So that art separates you…”
The separation she described was not merely the result of what one did, whether it be painting or sculpting or writing poetry. Helen said the distance between an artist and society was due to a quality both intangible and intrinsic, a “spiritual” or “magical” aspect that nonartists did not always understand and were sometimes frightened by. “They want you to behave a certain way. They want you to explain what you do and why you do it. Or they want you removed, either put on a pedestal or victimized. They can’t handle it.” Helen concluded that existing outside so-called normal life was simply the price an artist paid to create.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
Comments are welcome!
Q: Many of the world’s cultures have a mask tradition. Is there something special about Bolivian masks that first attracted you to them?
Bolivian Carnival Mask
A: My subject matter emerges directly from my travels. I visited Bolivia in 2017. What I especially liked then – and now – about Bolivian Carnival masks, is that they include additional textures – feathers, fur, costume jewelry, sequins, fabric, etc. that add to their physical presence. Masks from most of the other countries I’ve visited tend to be made of wood and/or paper mache and nothing else. In my view such masks are not as dramatic nor do they offer much expressive potential. They feel dead. They lack a certain “soulfulness.”
Furthermore, textures are challenging to render in soft pastel. For more than three decades I have been striving to improve my pastel techniques. By now I have a vast repertoire from which to select. As was true in my earlier series, with “Bolivianos” an important personal goal is to keep adding to the repertoire.
It takes months to create a pastel painting, which means I need masks that will hold my attention every day over the course of three or four months. I never want to be bored in the studio. If I am bored while making the work, those feelings will be directly transferred and I will make a boring pastel painting, something I hope never to do! The masks need to have a really strong ‘presence.’ Then as I slowly make a pastel painting, one that is exciting to work on from start to finish, I can transform my subject into something surprising and powerful that has never existed before!
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 558
Alexandria, VA
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
One of the main differences between the young girl who drew a line in chalk from the Metropolitan Museum all the way to her home on Park Avenue and the young woman who drew lines on canvas and paper twenty years later was that the latter understood the willfulness that drove the child. She was facing “the monster,” the consuming need to create, which was beyond her control but no longer beyond her comprehension. Helen [Frankenthaler] had long understood that her gift set her apart, and that it would be nearly impossible to describe how and why without sounding arrogant or cruel. “It’s saying I’m different, I’m special, consider me differently,” she explained years later. “And it’s also on the other side, a recognition that one is lonely, that one is not run of the mill, that the values are different, and yet we all go into the same supermarkets… and we all are moved one way or the other by children and seasons, and dreams. So the art separates you.”
The separation she described was not merely the result of what one did, whether it be painting or sculpting or writing poetry. Helen said the distance between an artist and society was due to a quality both tangible and intangible and intrinsic, a “spiritual” or “magical” aspect that nonartists did not always understand and were sometimes frightened by. “They want you to behave a certain way. They want you to explain what you do and why you do it. Or they want you removed, either put on a pedestal or victimized. They can’t handle it.” Helen concluded that existing outside so-called normal life was simply the price an artist paid to create.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 548
*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 who work in the arts are at risk of being in a popularity contest rather than a profession. If that fact causes you despair, you should probably pick another profession. Your desire to communicate must be bigger than your relationship to these chaotic and unfair realities. Ideally, we must be even more ‘professional’ than lawyers, doctors, accountants, hairdressers. We have to create our own standards of discipline.
All of the successful artists I know are very disciplined and very organized. Even if they don’t look organized, they have their own order.
Anna Deavere Smith in Letters to a Young Artist: Straight Up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts – for Actors, Performers, Writers, and Artists of Every Kind
Comments are welcome!
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