Blog Archives
Q: You often speak about the Mexican and Guatemalan figures in your paintings as serving a function analogous to actors in a repertory company. In other words, a particular figure plays a different role each time it appears in one of your pastel paintings. Would you choose a figure and show how you have painted it through the years?
A Chinese-influenced figure Barbara brought home from Mexico City in 1999.
“Answering the Call,” 58″ x 38,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 2000
“Scene Fifteen: Living Room,” 26″ x 20″ soft pastel on sandpaper, 2002
“Sometimes He Still Tried to Restrain Her,” 58″ x 38,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 2005
“Scene Twenty-One: Living Room,” 20″ x 26,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 2006 (see feet at top)
“Epiphany,” 38″ x 58,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 2012
“The Ancestors,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58″ x 38,” 2013
“The Storyteller,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 20″ x 26,” 2014
And she is in the painting that is on my easel now. See my February 14 blog post.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 128
Self-portrait with “Some Things We Regret”
* 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 chastening day yesterday. Color rose up and towered over me and advanced toward me. A tsunami – only that terrifying Japanese word for tidal wave will do – of color, and I was swept off my feet. In a frenzy, I tried to catch it. Sheet after sheet of Arches paper spread around the studio, covering all the surfaces of all my tables and finally the floor. I tried to keep one step ahead all morning. In the afternoon, I managed to get a toehold, and once again recognized my limitation: that vestige of all that a human being could know that is what I do know. I see this delicate nerve of myself as unimpressive. The fact is that is all I have. The richness of years, contained like wine in the goatskin of my body, meets my hand narrowly.
Anne Truitt in Turn: The Journal of an Artist
Comments are welcome!
Q: How do you remove pastel dust from your clothing, fingers, etc.?
Pastel dust
A: Pastel usually comes out of my clothes easily in the laundry, unless I have had an intense studio session where I let it make a total mess. I try not to wear good clothes to the studio. Getting it off my hands is easy with Artguard, a barrier cream I always apply before working. A good scrub with soap and water washes the pastel right off.
The worst occupational hazard, believe it or not, is what happens to the tops of my shoes! As I work, the dust falls onto my feet and I usually don’t notice until the end of the day. Whether made of canvas, leather, or whatever, shoes can be a problem when it comes to removing the dust.
Comments are welcome!
barbararachkoscoloreddust.com 