Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 551

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.
A creative process is a philosophical search, shaped by matters of practice and procedure that extend from the first touch of the artist’s pencil, brush, or chisel to the final decisions about what constitutes completeness.
Stylistic particularism – the decision as to what kind of abstract or representational artist you’re going to be – shapes, deepens, and extends the artist’s imaginative powers. Most artists who work for many years see their style evolve, sometimes dramatically. In the 1930s and 1940s Giacometti, who had first been admired for Surrealist sculptures in which representational elements are set in essentially abstract structures, found himself increasingly focused on the direct observation of the human figure. What by the mid-1940s could look like a wholesale transformation of his artistic language was the result of individual decisions all of which, during Giacometti’s career of nearly five decades, interlocked. They reinforced one another. They added up.
Between Abstraction and Representation by Jed Perl in The New York Review of Books, November 24, 2022
Comments are welcome!
Q: There are so many instances in the art world where paintings are discovered to be fakes. Do you think this is a potential problem where your work is concerned? Can your pastel paintings be forged?


A: For the record, a little-appreciated fact about my pastel-on-sandpaper paintings is that they can never be forged. To detect a fake, you would only need to x-ray them. If dozens of layers of revisions are not visible under the final pastel painting, you are not looking at an original Rachko, period.
My completed paintings are the results of thousands of decisions. They are the product of an extremely meticulous, labor-intensive, and self-invented process. This is the difference between spending months thinking about and creating a painting, as I do, or a single day. It’s highly doubtful that my rigorous creative process can EVER be duplicated.
Comments are welcome!
Q: Why do you make a preliminary drawing before you begin a pastel painting?

A: I make a preliminary charcoal drawing because that’s how I like to begin thinking about and planning a new pastel painting. I always make preliminary drawings the same size as the upcoming pastel painting. While I draw, I make decisions about the overall composition, decide where the major light and dark shapes will be, and envision the likely problem areas that lie ahead. These drawings are done quickly. I spend perhaps an hour on them.
Once the drawing is in my head I no longer need it. So I put it away and when it’s time to begin a subsequent pastel painting, I erase it. I wipe it out with a paper towel and make the next preliminary charcoal drawing directly on top. These are ephemeral tools, existing only for as long as I need them.
Comments are welcome!
Q: Do you plan your work in advance or is it improvisation?
A: My process is somewhere in between those two. I work from my own set-up or on-site photographs and make a preliminary sketch in charcoal before I start a pastel painting. Thousands of decisions about composition, color, etc. occur as I go along.
Although it starts out somewhat planned, I have no idea what a pastel painting will look like when it’s finished. Each piece takes about three months, not counting foreign travel, research, and a gestation period of several months to determine what the next pastel painting will even be.
Comments are welcome!
Q: Do you work with a particular audience in mind?
A: In general I would answer no, I have no ‘specific’ audience in mind. But I DO consider the audience in this sense. As I put finishing touches on a pastel painting, I pay attention to how all of my decisions up to that point lead the viewer’s eyes around. I fine tune – brightening some areas, heightening the contrast with what’s next to it, blurring, fading, and pushing back others – all to keep the viewer’s gaze moving around the painting. Once I am satisfied that it’s as visually exciting as I can make it, I consider the pastel painting finished, ready to be photographed, and driven to Virginia for framing.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 210

Lima, Peru (with self-portrait)
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Much that is said about beauty and its importance in our lives ignores the minimal beauty of an unpretentious street, a nice pair of shoes or a tasteful piece of wrapping paper, as though these things belonged to a different order of value from a church by Bramante or a Shakespeare sonnet. Yet these minimal beauties are far more important to our daily lives, and far more intricately involved in our own rational decisions, than the great works which (if we are lucky) occupy our leisure hours. They are part of the context in which we live our lives, and our desire for harmony, fittingness and civility expressed and confirmed in them. Moreover, the great works of architecture often depend for their beauty on the humble context that these lesser beauties provide. Longhena’s church on the Grand Canal would lose its confident and invocatory presence, were the modest buildings which nestle in its shadow to be replaced with cast-concrete office blocks, of the kind that ruin the aspect of St. Paul’s.
Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, by Roger Scruton
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Q: How do you decide how much realism and how much imagination to put into a pastel painting?
A: I wouldn’t say “decide” is the right word because creating a painting is not strictly the result of conscious decisions. I think of my reference photograph, my preliminary sketch, and the actual folk art objects I depict as starting points. Over the months that it takes to make a pastel painting, the resulting interpretive development pushes the painting far beyond this source material. When all goes well, the original material disappears and characters that belong to the painting and nowhere else emerge.
It is a mysterious process that I am still struggling to understand. This is the best way I can describe what it feels like from the inside, as the maker.
Comments are welcome!
Q: Last week you spoke about what happens before you begin a pastel painting. Would you talk about how you actually make the work?
A: I work on each pastel-on-sandpaper painting for approximately three months. I try to be in my studio 7 to 8 hours a day, five days a week.
I make thousands of creative decisions as I apply and layer soft pastels (I have thousands to choose from), blend them with my fingers, and mix new colors directly on the sandpaper. A finished piece consists of up to 30 layers of soft pastel.
My self-invented technique accounts for the vivid, intense color that often leads viewers of my originals to look very closely and ask, “What medium is this?” I believe I am pushing soft pastel to its limits, using it in ways that no other artist has done before.
Comments are welcome!