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Q: Tell us about any other interests you may have besides your art practice. Does it get reflected in your art? (Question from artamour)
A: Travel is arguably the best education there is. My travels around the world, supplemented with lots of research once I return home, are an important part of my creative process. This is how I develop ideas to forge a way ahead. It is difficult and solitary work.
Even though I became an artist later in life, travel as a source of inspiration found ME. And it has been a blessing! People around the world have become fans. Many send messages of thanks saying they are proud that some aspect of their country’s culture has inspired my work. I am always grateful and touched to know this.
I love old movies, especially early silent films, classic noir and horror films from the 1930s and 1940s, and anything by Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Wells. Probably this interest is most evident in the way I composed and designed pastel paintings in my early “Domestic Threats” series. I’m not sure it’s discernible in subsequent work.
Another passion is swimming. Four times a week I swim at a local pool. I love it! In my view swimming laps is the best exercise to help maintain fitness and to prepare for the focus and physicality I need in the studio.
Comments are welcome!
Q: Foreign travel has long been a significant aspect of your work. What are your views on cultural appropriation?
A: For more than three decades my inspiration and subject matter have come mainly from international travel to remote parts of the globe. I daresay there is no better education than travel. The result is that I possess a deep love and reverence for people and cultures all over the world. We are all connected by our shared humanity.
I wholeheartedly agree with what Henry Louis Gates eloquently expressed in the NY Times Book Review of October 12, 2021. Additions are mine.
Any teacher, any student, any writer, [any artist] sufficiently attentive and motivated, must be able to engage freely with subjects of their choice. That is not only the essence of learning; it’s the essence of being human.
And
What I owe to my teachers – and to my students – is a shared sense of wonder and awe as we contemplate works of the human imagination across space and time, works created by people who don’t look like us and who, in so many cases, would be astonished that we know their work and their names. Social identities can connect us in multiple and overlapping ways; they are not protected but betrayed when we turn them into silos with sentries. The freedom to write [and make art] can thrive only if we protect the freedom to read – and to learn. And perhaps the first thing to learn, in these storm-battered days, is that we could all do with more humility, and more humanity.
Comments are welcome!
Q: How does art help you explore and understand other cultures? (Question from Arte Realizzata)
A: Art helps me explore and understand other cultures by revealing our shared humanity across space and time. For me art and travel are intertwined; there is no better education! My art-making has led me to visit fascinating places in search of source material, ideas, and inspiration: to Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, France, England, Italy, Bali, Java, Sri Lanka, and India. I have seen firsthand that people all over the world are the same.
Art has led me to undertake in-depth studies of intriguing subjects: drawing, color, composition, art, art history, the art business, film, film history, photography, mythology, literature, music, jazz, jazz history, and archaeology, particularly that of ancient Mesoamerica (Olmec, Zapotec, Mixtec, Aztec, and Maya), and South America (the Inca and their ancestors).
This rich mixture of creative influences continually grows. For anyone wanting to spend their time on earth studying, learning, and meeting new challenges, there is hardly anything more fascinating than to be a well-travelled, perpetually curious artist!
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 372
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.
Artists will, in their long education of sifting through what they like and respond to and what they don’t, find they “see” an artist’s work in the environment. They see a Corot or a Hopper. They know then that they have found a good subject because of the similarity of poetic attraction. They see with a set of limits or conventions that speak to them.
But as time goes on and you continue working, you find you do not consider those subjects any longer but they still register. They belong to someone else. You have found other affinities. Or perhaps more importantly you have found your own. You respond now to your own internal song. Art is about art as much as it is about nature. Everything we respond to has passed through our filter of artistic influences.
Ian Roberts in Creative Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision
Comments are welcome!
Q: As you reflect on your overall art career beginning with your art education, what major event stands out as an important sign that you were headed in the right direction?
“His Mortal Enemy Was Poised Ready to Strike,” soft pastel on sandpaper
A: In 1989 I left a career in the Navy to pursue life as a full-time professional artist. In July 1996 Bryan and I were traveling in Mexico. Something told me to check the phone messages at our Virginia house so I did.
There was a message from Mia Kim, the director of Brewster Arts Ltd. on West 57th Street in Manhattan, requesting a dozen large pastel paintings for a two-person exhibition in October, just three months away!
At the time I was still living in Alexandria, Virginia so exhibiting in Manhattan – let alone securing prestigious gallery representation – seemed a far-off dream. Yes, I had sent Mia slides, but she had not seen my work in person. She first saw my “Domestic Threats” pastel paintings when I delivered them to the gallery for exhibition. The show was called “Monkey Business.”
Brewster Arts was an elegant New York gallery that specialized in Latin American Art. There was just one other non-Latina artist that Mia represented, Leonora Carrington, whom I met that October at my opening. I remember Mia introducing me and declaring to the entire crowd, “Barbara has the SOUL of a Latina.” I’ve always loved that. It was the first time I realized I was really on my way!
Brewster Arts Ltd. continued to represent my work until the gallery closed some years later.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 354
“Epiphany,” 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.
My earlier work had taught me that artistic activity is a form of reasoning, in which perceiving and thinking are indivisibly intertwined. A person who paints, writes, composes, dances, I felt compelled to say, thinks with his senses. This union of perception and thought turned out to be not merely a specialty of the arts. A review of what is known about perception, and especially about sight, made me realize that the remarkable mechanisms by which the senses understand the environment are all but identical with the operations described by the psychology of thinking. Inversely, there was much evidence that truly productive thinking in whatever area of cognition takes place in the realm of imagery. This similarity of what the mind does in the arts and what it does elsewhere suggested taking a new look at the long-standing complaint about the isolation and neglect of the arts in society and education. Perhaps the real problem was more fundamental: a split between sense and thought, which caused various deficiency diseases in modern man.
Rudolph Arnheim in Visual Thinking
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 287
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.
“To go back and introduce into all the schools art, to cut down on sports but bring arts, philosophy back into all educational systems,” he said. “And that’s what’s being cut everywhere. And I think that’s one of the sad and tragic parts of where we are. Education is the resistance to everything that is bad today.”
Jonas Mekas quoted in Want to Be Happy? Think Like an Old Person, by John Leland, The New York Times, Dec. 29, 2017.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 206
“Provocateur,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 26″ x 20″
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
And a career in higher education and medicine has taught me that creativity – whether in the sciences, arts or humanities – fosters controversy. We neither seek nor avoid controversy – we anticipate it and welcome the opportunity to explain the creative choices we make. We must take risks. We must be involved in the vital issues facing the world.
David J. Skorton, Director of the Smithsonian Institution in “What Do We Value?” Museum, May/June 2016
Comments are welcome!
Q: How do you decide how much to charge for your paintings?
Barbara’s studio
A: What to charge for my work is a complex question. The prices of my pastel paintings take into account many tangible and intangible factors. Here are a few:
Sales history.
My thirty-year-long exhibition history.
The costs of maintaining a studio in New York. My overhead goes up annually, but I do not raise prices every year to offset these expenses.
The countless hours of labor, cost of art materials, framing, photography, transportation, foreign travel, etc. that go into creating a painting.
Costs for marketing, social media, advertising, website design and upkeep, ongoing education, etc.
Somewhat less quantifiable factors such as my reputation as an artist, the real demand for my work, goodwill, the fact that I work full-time as a professional artist, etc.
Comments are welcome!
barbararachkoscoloreddust.com 
Q: It is well known that you gain inspiration from foreign travel. Has anyone ever accused you of stealing their culture?
Feb 9
Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust
The Bolivian side of Lake Titicaca
A: Yes, a few people have done so via comments on Facebook. It came as a shock.
The logic of such an accusation presumes ownership. I don’t believe any person has a claim to owning culture.
Travel is arguably the best education there is. My travels around the world, supplemented with lots of research once I return home, are an important part of my creative process. This is how I develop ideas to forge a way ahead. It is difficult and solitary work.
Every artist is tasked with remaining open to influences – however, wherever, and whenever they appear. Somewhat late in life, travel as a source of inspiration found ME. And it has been a blessing!
People around the world have become fans. Many send messages of thanks saying they are proud that some aspect of their country’s culture has inspired my work. I am always grateful and touched to know this.
Comments are welcome!
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Posted in 2019, An Artist's Life, Bolivia, Creative Process, Inspiration, Studio, The West Village, Working methods
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