Blog Archives
Q: Another exhibition was described as “a journey from identity to authenticity.” Does that resonate? (Question from “Pastel, Passion, and Perseverance: An Interview with Barbara Rachko” in .ART Odyssey: Healing)
A: Yes, especially the authenticity part.
My work has always come from a deep place. Each painting is the inevitable result of three or four months of daily engagement—the constant adjustments, decisions, and struggles. By the time it’s finished, it couldn’t be any other way.
That, to me, is authenticity. Identity may be what we inherit — culture, upbringing, circumstance. Authenticity is what we strip back to, the choices we make that reflect our core. As I get older, l’ve been shedding what doesn’t serve me. I want to use my time and energy on what makes me a better artist and a better person.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 691
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.
Repeatedly standing in the fire is a requirement of the art life. The initial act of choosing this vocation requires courage, as does sticking with it when others think you should give up. We prioritize an endeavor that strikes the rest of the world as absurd. We repeatedly risk failure and frustration in the drive to grow our practice. We are visionaries at the front of the breaking wave in our culture, calling out difficult realities that no one wants to think about, and we are often beaten back in attempts to silence us for that role.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
Comments are welcome!
Q: Have you noticed any common characteristics among the people who collect your work?
“Poseur,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 70” x 50” framed
A: Yes! They are fascinating people living lives devoted to nonstop learning, adventurous travel, and other proactive pursuits. Collectors of my work typically range in age from 40 to around 80. They are college graduates with advanced degrees. Sometimes they don’t have kids, which is why they have disposable income and time to pursue their interests in art and culture.
When I meet them (presuming my work was sold through a gallery or other third party), we usually have much to talk about – art, art history, photography, cinema, film history, dance, drama, music, travel, archaeology, Mexico, Central and South America, Bali – the list goes on and on. With so much in common, we quickly become good friends!
Comments are welcome!
Q: Would you speak more about being represented by Brewster Gallery in the late 1990s?
A: In 1996 I landed my first major New York gallery, Brewster Gallery. I was still living in Virginia and Mia Kim, the director, had accepted my work on the basis of unsolicited slides mailed to the gallery in July. The first time she saw my pastel paintings in person was when I delivered them for a solo exhibition in October.
Brewster represented Latin American masters such as Frida Kahlo, Francisco Zuniga, Diego Rivera, Francisco Toledo, and Rufino Tamayo. Mia Kim, the director, said that she sometimes had to defend her decision to represent me. Mia’s fabulous response was, “Barbara has the SOUL of a Latina!” My work at that time was heavily influenced by Mexican culture. Mia immediately understood what I was doing in my work. How thrilled and honored I was to be represented by a gallery where my fellow sole non-Latina was Leonora Carrington! Leonora came to my opening.
Those were wonderful days!
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 645
New York City
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
It is critical that developing voice be an intensive, holistic process. Just as we cannot simply dip our bucket into the shallow pool of our culture and emerge with any substantial yield, we cannot generate deep, meaningful work unless we cultivate a deep, meaningful life. We must enlarge and intensify our way of being in the world, even as its forces conspire to distract, numb, and dumb us down… Regardless of the situation into which we were born, we can conjure our own expansive journey, guided by altruistic ideals, as we follow our vision. Being an artist is a way to simultaneously exist on a higher plane of consciousness while moving through our brief lives on this planet.
The art world is a business system that creates and follows trends. ‘Hot topics’ generate buzz only to become stale and replaced months later. However, the process of finding voice is timeless, even though the end products evolve with time.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 642
New York City
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Radical changes in our culture threaten to undermine the potency of art and artists alike. Disparate forces conspire to lower the bar for how we expect art to function. As decades go by, we are educating and evolving to value left-brain strengths over holistic right-brain thought, with disastrous consequences for humanity… Deep contemplation has been hijacked by addictive technology. Rising authoritarianism strives to squash dissenting and diverse voices, as well as historical truths and critical thinking skills. Social media approval affects the art that is produced, shared, and validated. Easily digested work is promoted, while the most compelling work (the kind that could transform the trajectory of art, or affect real social change) is left behind. Critics are coining terms like ‘Zombie Formalism’ … and ‘Zombie Figuration’ … in response to the sterility and stultifying sameness of much contemporary work. It’s as if artists were absorbing online algorithms into their bloodstreams. This empty, safe sensibility riffs and rehashes a vacuous culture, generating a perpetual cycle of well-branded insignificance.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 623
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
At the time [the Renaissance], Bologna was unique in championing the professions of women. The home of Europe’s oldest university, which had supported female students since the thirteenth century, the city considered women artists as integral to its development. Praised by scholars, written about by biographers and adored by the locals, they were also supported by patrons of all social classes (from bankers to barbers), creating a varied culture of artistic patronage. (By contrast, in Florence and Naples, commissioning was reserved for select noble families.). Women were also encouraged to sign their work, as well as to paint self-portraits for the purpose of being known and, most importantly, remembered. No wonder scholars have recorded a staggering sixty-eight women artists working in the city between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
These notable exceptions remind us that women have always been perfectly capable of being artists. But while there could have been an abundance of women working at this time, in reality female artists were an absolute rarity, seen as ‘tokens’ rather than pioneers. (After de Rossi’s death [in 1530], no female sculptor is mentioned in the city’s records for 200 years.). And little knowledge remains of those working during the Renaissance period. Most of what we know has been passed down by male scholars and through legal documents, rarely from the women themselves.
Katy Hessel in The Story of Art Without Men
Comments are welcome!
Q: What would you say collectors of your work have in common?
Barbara’s Studio
A: That’s a great question! I’d say that collectors of my work typically range in age from about 40 to their late 70s, they are college graduates with advanced degrees, they often don’t have kids, which is why they have disposable income and time to pursue their interests in art and culture. When I meet them (presuming my work was sold through a gallery or other third party), we usually have much to talk about – art, art history, photography, cinema, film history, dance, drama, music, travel, archaeology, Mexico, Central and South America, India, Asia – the list goes on and on.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 588
Screen shot from “Barbara Rachko: True Grit” Photo: Jennifer Cox
*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 structure of the hand is not… “just anything;” the fingers have certain characteristic relationships, certain ranges of relative movement, certain kinds of crossing, torquing, jumping, sliding, pressing, releasing movements that guide the music to come out a certain way. Graceful work uses those patterns and instinctively moves through them and out as we find ever-fresh combinations. The shape and size of the human hand brings powerful but subtle laws into every kind of art, craftsmanship, mechanical work, and into our ideas and feelings as well. There is a continuous dialogue between hand and instrument, hand and culture. Artwork is not thought up in consciousness and then, as a separate phase, executed by the hand. The hand surprises us, creates and solves problems on its own. Often enigmas that battle our brains are dealt with easily, unconsciously, by the hand.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 581
With recent “Bolivianos”
*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 essence of style is this: We have something in us, about us; it can be called many things, but for now let’s call it our original nature. We are born with our original nature, but on top of that, as we grow up, we accommodate to the patterns and habits of our culture, family, physical environment, and the daily business of the life we have taken on. What we are taught solidifies as “reality.” Our persona, the mask we show the world, develops out of our experience and training, step by step from infancy to adulthood. We construct our world through the actions of perception, learning, and expectation. We construct our “self” through the same actions of perception, learning, and expectation. World and self interlock and match each other, step by step and shape by shape. If the two constructions, self and world, mesh, we grow from child to adult becoming “normally adjusted individuals.” If they do not mesh so well, we may experience feelings of inner division, loneliness, or alienation.
If we should happen to become artists, our work takes on, to a certain extent, the style of the time: the clothing in which we are dressed by our generation, our country and language, our surroundings, the people who have influenced us.
But somehow, even when we are grown up and “adjusted,” everything we do and are – our handwriting, the vibrato of our voice, the way we handle the bow or breathe into the instrument, our way of using language, the look in our eyes, the pattern of whirling fingerprints on our hand – all these things are symptomatic of our original nature. They all show the imprint of our own deeper style or character.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
Comments are welcome!
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