Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 719
With “Magisterial,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 70” x 50” framed
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on
The secret of success is to find out what your talent is for and then seek to develop the technical abilities you will need to assist you in acquiring the necessary skills. It is here that the secret of success or the forming of great achievements lies for every noble artist, no matter what their medium is. Passion and inspiration will come automatically to assist your noble vision when you broaden your experience and knowledge to become an expert in your particular field, thus helping to improve the lives of mankind. Believing that what you are creating will bring advancement to man’s life will also follow as will hopefulness for the future. Those who benefit from your service, directly or indirectly, will reward you for that which your rare talent has produced and for improving their lives while contributing to the advancement of mankind.
Samuel Adoquei in Origin of Inspiration: Seven Short Essays for Creative People
Comments are welcome!
Q: What’s on the easel today?
Charcoal drawing
A: This preliminary charcoal drawing is my first tentative move towards the next “Bolivianos” pastel painting. I took the reference photo in February during my Bolivia trip to research and experience Carnival in Oruro.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 707
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
Intuition often serves as a diving rod that guides us to our secret language. ‘Listening to your gut’ is actually a rapid process of previous experience and cumulative knowledge that results in a seemingly sudden ‘educated guess.’ You may not be able to consciously access all the memories and information that led to your ‘hunch,’ but they are there, nevertheless. Many of us have a keenly developed sense of intuition, but do not trust it. But often, when we are deliberating a problem, we lay our head on our pillow, all the rational ‘pros and cons’ drop away, and we know the answer to our question. We simply need to cultivate and have faith in that knowing.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
Comments are welcome!
Q: You read books on Friedrich Nietzsche and other philosophers. How has philosophy and your personal experience shaped the latest series, Bolivianos? (Question from Vedica Art Studios and Gallery)
A: It’s difficult to pinpoint how philosophy specifically shaped my work because my curiosity spans so many subjects. Some critics have described me as a Renaissance woman, remarking on my wide-ranging and voracious reading. It’s true—I’m genuinely interested in practically everything!
In pursuit of making art, I have undertaken in-depth studies of numerous intriguing fields: drawing, color, composition, gross anatomy, art and art history, the art business, film history, photography, psychology, mythology, literature, philosophy, religion, music, jazz history, and archaeology—particularly ancient Mesoamerica (Olmec, Zapotec, Mixtec, Aztec, and Maya) and South America (the Inca and their ancestors).
Since the early 1990s, my inspiration and subject matter have come primarily from international travel to remote parts of the globe, especially Mexico, Central America, and South America. Travel is by far the best education! By visiting distant destinations, I have developed a deep reverence for people and cultures around the world. People everywhere are connected by our shared humanity.
These travels, supplemented by extensive research at home, are essential parts of my creative process. Research can be solitary and demanding, but I truly enjoy it. I want to know as much as possible, and this curiosity generates ideas for new work, propelling me into unexplored creative realms.
Foreign travel always expands our ways of thinking. This rich mixture of creative influences continually evolves and finds its way into my pastel paintings. Working, learning, evolving, and growing—I am perpetually curious and can hardly imagine a better way to spend my time on Earth!
Comments are welcome!
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.
barbararachkoscoloreddust.com 