Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 140
“Big Wow,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Frankly, I think you’re better off doing something on the assumption that you will not be rewarded for it, that it will not receive the recognition it deserves, that it will not be worth the time and effort invested in it.
The obvious advantage to this angle is, of course, if anything good comes of it, then it’s an added bonus.
The second, more subtle and profound advantage is that by scuppering all hope of worldly and social betterment from one creative act, you are finally left with only one question to answer:
Do you make this damn thing exist or not?
And once you can answer that truthfully for yourself, the rest is easy.
Hugh MacLeod in Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity
Comments are welcome!
Q: All artists go through periods when they wonder what it’s all for. What do you do during times like that?
Barbara’s studio
A: Fortunately, that doesn’t happen very often. I love and enjoy all the varied facets involved in being an artist, even (usually) the business aspects, which are just another puzzle to be solved. I have vivid memories of being stuck in a job that I hated, one I couldn’t immediately leave because I was an officer in the US Navy. Life is so much better as a visual artist!
I appreciate the freedom that comes with being a self-employed artist. The words of Louise Bourgeois often come to mind: “It is a PRIVILEGE to be an artist.”
Still, with very valid reasons, no one ever said that an artist’s life is easy. It is difficult at every phase.
Books offer sustenance, especially ones written by artists who have endured all sorts of terrible hardships beyond anything artists today are likely to experience. I just pick up a favorite book. My Wednesday blog posts, “Pearls from artists,” give some idea of the sorts of inspiration I find. I read the wise words of a fellow artist, then I get back to work. As I quickly become intrigued with the problems at hand in a painting, all doubt usually dissolves.
I try to remember: Artists are extremely fortunate to be doing what we love and what we are meant to do with our short time on earth. What more could a person ask?
Comments are welcome!
Q: How did you happen to have a photograph published in The Wall Street Journal?
Sun Tunnels by Nancy Holt
A. That is a long story. To get far away from New York for the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, my friend, Donna Tang, and I planned a two-week road trip to see land art sites in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado. (Donna did excellent research).
We hoped for a private tour of Roden Crater with James Turrell, which is not easy to arrange. I had also invited my friend Ann Landi, an art critic and arts writer, to join us, hoping she might get an interview with Turrell and write an article for Artnews. Turrell has been working on Roden Crater for 30+ years so Ann was interested in seeing it too! Ann contacted Turrell’s gallery – Gagosian – but they later relayed Turrell’s refusal.
We were planning to see other land art sites. As an alternative to Roden Crater and Turrell, Ann pitched a story to The Wall Street Journal about Sun Tunnels and Nancy Holt (Robert Smithson’s wife, who as the only woman in the land art movement, has never been given her due). The Journal said yes, so Ann made plans to join Donna and me in Salt Lake City.
The three of us visited Sun Tunnels, Spiral Getty, and other sites together. Ann had a brand new point-and-shoot camera that she hadn’t yet learned how to use. I always take lots of photos whenever I travel. After we returned home, I sent Ann a few images and she asked permission to submit them with her article. I was thrilled when The Wall Street Journal requested JPEGs. It was the first time I’ve had a photograph published in a major newspaper.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 111
Perkins Center for the Arts, Collingswood, NJ
It is very difficult to describe the creative experience in such a way that it would cover all cases. One of the essentials is the variety with which one approaches any kind of artistic creation. It doesn’t start in any one particular way and it is not always easy to say what gets you going.
I’ve sometimes made the analogy with eating. Why do you eat? You’re hungry. You are sort of in the mood to eat, and if you are in the mood to eat, the food tastes better; you’re more interested in what you’re eating. The whole experience is more “creative.” It’s the hunger that stimulates you to eat. It’s the same thing in art; except that, in art, the hunger is the need for self-expression.
How does it come about that you feel hungry? You don’t know, you just feel hungry. The juices are working, and suddenly you are aware of the fact that you want a piece of bread and butter. It’s about the same in art. If you pass your life in creating works of art in one field or another, you recognize the “hunger” signs and you are quick to take advantage of them, if they’re accompanied by ideas. Sometimes, you have the hunger and you don’t have any ideas; there’s no bread in the house. It’s as simple as that.
AAron Copland in The Creative Experience: Why and How Do We Create?, Stanley Rosner and Lawrence E. Abt, editors
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 40
Balinese boy in Hindu dress
* 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 film is a succession of snapshots more or less posed, and it only very rarely gives us the illusion of the unexpected and rare. Ninety films out of a hundred are merely interminable poses. One doesn’t premeditate a photograph like a murder or a work of art.
Photography is rather like those huge American department stores where you find all you want: old master paintings, locomotives, playing cards, tempests, gardens, opera glasses, pretty girls. But steer clear at all costs of the floorwalkers. They are terrible chatterbox bores who have no idea what they are saying.
A photographer for the Daily Mirror said to me: “The most beautiful photos I’ve ever taken were on a day I had forgotten my film.”
That photographer is a poet, perhaps, but quite certainly an imbecile. The photographer’s personality?
Obviously each of them blows his nose in his own fashion. But the most successful photographs are not those that required the most trouble.
That would be just too easy.
Carlo Rim in On the Snapshot
Comments are welcome!
Q: To be a professional visual artist is to have two full-time jobs because an artist must continually balance the creative and the business sides of things. How do you manage to be so productive?
No computer in sight
A: With social media and other new ways of doing business, managing it all is getting more difficult every day. Bear in mind that I say this as someone who does not have the extra time commitment of a day job, nor do I have children or other family members to care for. I have no idea how other visual artists, who may have these responsibilities and more, keep up with all the tasks that need to be done. In The Artist’s Guide: How to Make A Living Doing What You Love, Jackie Battenfield lists a few of them (believe me, there are others):
…being an artist isn’t just about making art. You have many other responsibilities – managing a studio, looking for opportunities, identifying an audience for your work, caring for and protecting what you have created, and securing money, time, and space – in addition to whatever is happening in your personal life.
To begin with I try to maintain regular studio hours. I generally work on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and once I’m at the studio I stay there for a minimum of 7 hours. To paint I need daylight so in the spring and summer my work day tends to be longer. My pastel-on-sandpaper paintings are extremely labor-intensive. I need to put in sufficient hours in order to accomplish anything. When I was younger I used to work in my studio 6 days a week, 9 hours or more a day. I have more commitments now, and can no longer work 60+ hours a week, but I still try to stick to a schedule. And once I’m at the studio I concentrate on doing the creative work, period.
I am productive when I keep the business and creative sides physically separate., ie., no computers, iPads, etc. are allowed into the studio. Recently I tried an experiment. I brought my iPad to the studio, thinking, “Surely I am disciplined enough to use it only during my lunch break.” But no, I wasted so much time checking email, responding to messages on Facebook, etc., when I should have been focusing on solving problems with the painting that was on my easel. I learned a good lesson that day and won’t bring my iPad to the studio again.
As has long been my practice, I concentrate on business tasks when I get home in the evening and on my, so called, days off. After a day spent working in the studio, I generally spend a minimum of two to three hours more to answer email, apply for exhibitions, work on my blog, email images to people who need them, etc. At present I have part-time help with social media – the talented Barbra Drizin, of Start from Scratch Social Media – although my time commitment there is growing, too, as more details need my attention.
No one ever said it would be easy being a professional artist, but then again, I would not choose to spend my days any other way. As I often say, “Being an artist is a calling. Contrary to popular belief, it is NOT a life for wimps… or slackers.”
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 34
On the High Line
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store.
In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the king’s army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of monuments, department stores, mammals, wonders of nature, methods of transport, works of art, and other classified treasures from around the globe.
Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image. Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern.
Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
Susan Sontag in On Photography
Comments are welcome!
barbararachkoscoloreddust.com 
New eBook!
Jan 18
Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust
Cover
I am pleased to announce that my first eBook, FROM PILOT TO PAINTER, is available now on Amazon!
It is based on my blog and is part memoir, including my personal loss on 9/11, insights into my creative practice, and intimate reflections on what it’s like to be an artist living in New York City now.
The eBook includes new material not found on the blog: 25+ reproductions of my vibrant pastel-on-sandpaper paintings, a Foreword by Ann Landi (who writes for ARTnews and The Wall Street Journal), and more.
Thank you for your support!
http://www.amazon.com/From-Pilot-Painter-Interview-Barbara-ebook/dp/B00HNVR200/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1389292390&sr=8-1&keywords=barbara+rachko
Note: If you do not own a Kindle, you can download a free Kindle app.
Here is the one for MACs:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000464931
Here is a link for the rest:
Kindle Cloud Reader – Read instantly in your browser
Smartphones – iPhone & iPod touch, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry
Computers – Mac, Windows 8, Windows 7, XP & Vista
Tablets – iPad, Android Tablet, Windows 8
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=sv_kstore_3?ie=UTF8&docId=1000493771
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Posted in 2014, An Artist's Life, Art in general, Art Works in Progress, Black Paintings, Creative Process, Domestic Threats, Gods and Monsters, Guatemala, Inspiration, Mexico, New York, NY, Painting in General, Pastel Painting, Photography, Quotes, Studio, Travel, Working methods
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