Blog Archives
Q: You once faced a major creative block. How did you break through it? (Question from “Pastel, Passion, and Perseverance: An Interview with Barbara Rachko” in .ART Odyssey: Healing)
A: That was in 2007, after I finished my Domestic Threats series. The last painting in that series hardly interested me. I was wringing my hands, thinking, “I’m a full-time artist not making art —what do I do NOW?” It was frightening. At the time, I was also taking a jazz history class at Lincoln Center. One day the instructor spoke about Miles Davis.
He explained how Davis moved away from bebop —where musicians packed in as many notes as possible to show off—to cool jazz, where every note carried weight.
And something clicked. I realized I’d been working like bebop: showing off meticulous detail, every stitch of fabric, every grain in a wooden floor.
That revelation was my way forward. I stripped everything back. No more domestic backdrops. Just the figures, placed against solid black. Only what mattered. That was the beginning of my Black Paintings.
The block that had haunted me for months lifted in an instant, because I’d found a new way to speak. I realized the black background represented the dark place I had emerged from; the vibrant figures symbolized resilience and life.
It was like a lightbulb going off.
Comments are welcome!
Q: Please introduce yourself and tell us what makes your work unique. (Question from Bold Journey)
With a Giacometti at Fondation Maeght, St. Paul de Vence, France; Photo: Christine Marchal
A: I am a contemporary painter based in New York City, best known for large pastel-on-sandpaper paintings inspired by Bolivian Carnival masks and Latin American folk art. For more than 40 years, I have been committed to elevating pastel as a fine art medium.
My blog, Barbara Rachko’s Colored Dust, has 229,000 subscribers, and I’m the subject of the documentary Barbara Rachko: True Grit, available on YouTube. My e-book, From Pilot to Painter, tells my story of moving from Navy Commander, commercial pilot, and Boeing-727 Flight Engineer to professional artist.
My work has been developed into three major series—Domestic Threats, Black Paintings, and Bolivianos. In 2023, I was featured in a documentary that premiered at the Newport Beach Film Festival, winning both the Audience Award and Best in Category.
Comments are welcome!
Q: Can you elaborate on the title of your very first series, “Domestic Threats”?
A: All of the paintings in this series are set in places where I reside or used to live, either a Virginia house or New York apartments, i.e., domestic environments. Each painting typically contains a conflict of some sort, at least one figure who is being menaced or threatened by a group of figures. So I named the series “Domestic Threats.”
Depending on what is going on in the country at a particular moment in time, however, people have seen political associations in my work. When my husband, Bryan, was killed on 9/11, many people thought the title, “Domestic Threats,” was prescient. They have ascribed all kinds of domestic terrorism associations to it, but that is not really what I had in mind. For a time some thought I was hinting at scenes of domestic violence, but that also is not what I had intended. “Domestic Threats” seems to be fraught with associations that I never considered, but it’s an apt title for this body of work.
Comments are welcome!
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