Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 680
“Sacrificial” (on the wall) and “Trickster” (on the floor)
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
What makes a work transcendent and powerful is a personal intensity, an ‘extra’ quality. Yet that intensity is exclusive to each artist: extra strangeness, subtlety, causticity, bravado, sensuality, rawness, grandiosity, succinctness, mystery, vulnerability, truth, etc. For an individual artist to infuse an object or an experience with their own ‘extra’ quality requires not only skill or ideas, but the profound benevolence of consistently delivering in spades.
It is this passion and genuine feeling, specific to each creator, that lives on in the art as a gift. It is wrapped up in the work, forever suspended in time. The artist says,
Here… everything I possessed in this moment is embodied in this object… All skills I have painstakingly learned, all of the knowledge I possess, the joy and pain I have felt and all the experiences I have lived. I spun these into the perfect, most sublime form, and packed it up, but for you to unwrap anytime you need sustenance. It will nourish, comfort, and surround you, because you have chosen it.
Each viewer selects which works of art speak to them… which embodied feelings, concepts, and knowledge they value. An empathic connection is forged through the art object or experience. What is love, but to say to someone, ‘you are truly seen and understood?’ Art offers this as well, by reaching out to puncture through the membrane of our emotional isolation, to articulate how we feel in the moments when we cannot find words. It tells the artist and viewer alike, ‘You are not alone. You are not alone in how your brain works. You are not alone in the pain you feel. You are not alone in what you notice or appreciate, or in how much love you have to give.’
Pour that love into an art object. It can handle all the devotion you pack into it, and more.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
Comments are welcome!
Q: Do you have any big projects coming up?
A: I certainly do! I have been a painter for forty years, and for most of that time, my work has been shaped by foreign travel. At seventy-two, I find myself thinking about legacy — what I want to leave behind. Documenting my creative process on film has become an essential part of this objective.
In the “Bolivianos” series, I have been creating pastel-on-sandpaper paintings that transform the vivid masks of the Bolivian Carnival into universal archetypes. I first encountered these masks at a museum in La Paz in 2017.
Circumstances have aligned perfectly for an exciting next step: another trip to Bolivia and a new documentary. Our upcoming film will be a follow-up to the award-winning “Barbara Rachko: True Grit” (released in 2023), marking a deeper exploration of my thirty-five-year engagement with folk art from Mexico, Central America, and South America.
(See https://youtu.be/JJWLy84kXI0?si=v7JHIq9ViYGgs76U)
In February 2026, I will return to Bolivia with a two-person film crew to experience Carnival firsthand — to immerse myself in its rhythm, history, and meaning. Recognized by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, this festival offers an extraordinary window into Bolivia’s cultural soul.
Our film will chronicle my journey as essential research — a vital continuation of my creative inquiry over these past decades. With this trip and film, I hope to create my next body of pastel-on-sandpaper paintings, rich with color, spirit, and the enduring vitality of Oruro’s Carnival.
Comments are welcome!
Q: Do you ever use other people’s photographs as reference material for your paintings?
Some Reference Photos
A: For a number of reasons, I never use anyone else’s photographs as reference material. It seems wrong on many levels. Besides the fact that it is theft of intellectual property, it would mean I did not have the all-important experience of finding and making the photograph. Each reference photograph is the beginning of an idea for a future pastel painting. How each photograph even comes to exist – the travel and adventure behind it and the memories and stories that result – is an essential first step in my months- and even years-long creative process.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 667
“Magisterial,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58” x 38”, in progress
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
This is the eternal origin of art – that a human being confronts a form that wants to be one a work of art through him. Not a figment of his soul, but something that appears to the soul and demands the soul’s creative power. What is required is a deed that a man does with his whole being […] and the work is imperious: if I do not serve it properly, it breaks, or it breaks me. The form that confronts me I cannot experience nor describe: I can only actualize it. And yet I see it, radiant in the splendor of the confrontation, far more clearly than all the clarity of the experienced world.
Martin Buber quoted in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice by Kate Kretz
Comments are welcome!
Q: How do you feel about the fact that more people view an artist’s work online than ever see it in person?
A: This has been a dilemma for decades. Don’t get me wrong. Artists are indeed fortunate to have alternative ways to share our art, such as on the internet, but there is just no substitute for seeing art in person! I remember friends telling me about a review of a Nan Goldin exhibition that said, “All of the pleasure circuits are fired in looking.” That rarely happens when you view art online. Yet this is how most people experience our work – at a remove and on a small screen.
Nowadays, a global audience will see art on their phones instead of in our studios or in a gallery or museum. My pastel paintings are quite large and very detailed so when people finally see them in person, they are often surprised. They had gotten used to seeing them in a much smaller scale online, where very few of the meticulous and subtle details I incorporate into them are visible.
Comments are welcome!
Q: Does your work look different to you on days when you are sad, happy, etc.?
Barbara’s Studio
A: I am much more critical on days when I am sad so that the faults, imperfections, and things I wish I had done better stand out. Fortunately, all of my work is framed behind plexiglas so I can’t easily go back in to touch up perceived faults. I am reminded of the expression, “Always strive to improve, whenever possible. It is ALWAYS possible!” However, I’ve learned that re-working a painting is a bad idea. You are no longer deeply involved in making it and the zeitgeist has changed. The things you were concerned with are gone: some are forgotten, others are less urgent.
For most artists our work is autobiography. Art is personal. When I look at a completed pastel painting, I usually remember exactly what was happening in my life as I created it. Each piece is a snapshot – maybe a time capsule, if anyone could decode it – that reflects and records a particular moment. When I finally pronounce a piece finished and sign it, that’s it, THE END. It’s as good as I can make it at that point in time. I’ve incorporated everything I was thinking about, what I was reading, how I was feeling, what I valued, art exhibitions I visited, programs that I heard on the radio or watched on television, music that I listened to, what was going on in New York, in the country, and in the world.
It is still a mystery how this heady mix finds its way into the work. During the time that I spend on it, each particular painting teaches me everything it has to teach. A painting requires months of looking, reacting, correcting, searching, thinking, re-thinking, revising. Each choice is made for a reason and together these decisions dictate what the final piece looks like. On days when I’m sad I tend to forget that. On happier days I remember that the framed pastel paintings that you see have an inevitability to them. If all art is the result of one’s having gone through an experience to the end, as I believe it is, then the paintings could not, and should not, look any differently.
Comments are welcome.
Pearls from artists* # 630
With Margaret Anderson, Naoshima, Kagawa, Japan
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Fresh experiences can lead to new tastes and a life that feels longer, Julie contended. Remember when you were little and an hour-long car ride felt like a lifetime? “I think it’s because, truly, everything’s new. When you experience new things, time slows down a little bit,” she told me. “When you go on trips – which is my favorite thing to do – everything is new, and you feel young again. And reinvigorated with new ideas, new perspectives, a new understanding of yourself.”
Julie Curtiss quoted in Get The Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See by Bianca Bosker
Comments are welcome!
Q: What was it like having a documentary made about you? (Question from Culture Focus Magazine)
With Jennifer Cox at the 2023 Newport Beach Film Festival!
A: I loved the whole experience! Before this happened, I had wanted to make a film for ten years or so, ever since Brainard Carey, an artists’ coach, suggested the idea when I told him about my unusual background. Often I hear from artist friends and others that my life story is truly inspiring. Finally being able to make “Barbara Rachko: True Grit” and now to share it with a wider audience is a dream come true! Jennifer Cox, our director, and Annette Apitz, our co-producer, were ideal collaborators over the fifteen months it took to make the film.
It is truly gratifying to hear so many positive responses from viewers of our film. Surprisingly, the film has even gone on to have a life in film festivals. “Barbara Rachko: True Grit” made it’s World Premier at the prestigious 2023 Newport Beach Film Festival in Orange County, California, where it received both the Audience Award and the Best in category Award for Art, Architecture, and Design. In addition, we earned Honorable Mention at the 2023 International Fine Arts Film Festival Santa Barbara and were recognized as an Award Nominee at the 2023 Montreal Women Film Festival.
To date in 2024 our film has screened at New Plaza Cinema on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and at Noise Media Art Fair in Vienna, Austria. I think I speak for the filmmakers and myself when I say, “Barbara Rachko: True Grit” has exceeded all of our expectations!
Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJWLy84kXI0
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 625
Downtown Manhattan
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Think of one of those rare, truly exceptional outings to the cinema. In the lobby afterward the experience elicits from us a language of paralysis and disappearance: “I forgot myself. It could have gone on forever.” Stepping out onto the street, we feel that somehow nothing is as it was before. The passing cars, the night sky above the glass towers, the streetlights reflected on the wet pavement: everything glows with a strange immediacy and newness. It is as if the film had done something to the world. A similar thing might happen when we put down a great novel or take in a powerful piece of music.
The Book of Revelation contains a memorable line: “Behold, I make all things new.” Reflecting on this ancient text, the critic Northrop Frye defined the Apocalypse as “the way the world looks once the ego has disappeared.” Every great artistic work is a quiet apocalypse. It tears off the veil of ego, replacing old impressions with new ones at once inexorably alien and profoundly meaningful. Great works of art have a unique capacity to arrest the discursive mind, raising it to a level of reality that is more expansive than the egoic dimension we normally inhabit. In this sense, art is the transfiguration of the world.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise,Critique, and Call to Action
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 622
In the 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.
Divining meaning from a painting is not so simple that it can be codified in a book, and [Mark] Rothko certainly would not have wanted such a guide to his work. So much of understanding his work is personal, and so much of it is made up of the process of getting inside the work. It is like the “plastic journey” he describes in his “Plasticity” chapter – you must undertake a sensuous adventure within the world of the painting in order to know it at all. He cannot tell you what his paintings, or anyone else’s, is about. You have to experience them. Ultimately, if he could have expressed the truth – the essence of these works – he probably would not have bothered to paint them. As his works exemplify, writing and painting involve different kinds of knowing.
Christopher Rothko in The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art by Mark Rothko
Comments are welcome!
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