Blog Archives
Pearls from Artists* # 313
Barbara and Tomas in Panajachel, Guatemala
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Proclaiming that the object in Surrealism was fundamental, [Andre] Breton suggests a radical transition in surrealist creation, one that liberated the poet-artist from all constraints in the making of the artistic object. Breton’s text calls for a “revolution of the object,” suggesting that in the placing of an object into a new context, and thus attributing it with a new meaning – also called a “detournement” – which takes precedence. Drawing in his interpretation of Hegelian subject-object relations, Breton describes the “object” as a work of art that relies on a philosophical procedure, affirming the surrealist process as one that is realized in the experience of apprehending the object through a dialectical method. Citing the work of Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst, Breton explains that an object may become a product of surrealist creation through the simple “manipulation” of it. Here ”manipulation“ is defined as a procedure which reveals the object in its original and new state at the same time. If taking an object out of its original context and placing it in a new space creates the potential for a creative act, then this text seems to validate the surrealist practice of collecting. As the collector acquired objects and unites them in a gallery or a home, they assume new significance contingent upon their physical juxtaposition to other objects.
Moon Dancers: Yup’ik Masks and the Surrealists, edited by Jennifer Field, Introduction by Christina Rudofsky
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Q: What is your current priority career goal and what steps are you taking to attain it?
“White Star,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″
A: My priority is to find a New York gallery to represent my work. Recently I began working with an advisor who has thirty years of experience in the local art scene. He is working to help facilitate an introduction to the right gallerist.
This is no easy task at present. More and more galleries are closing while record numbers of artists clamor for attention.
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Q: Would you talk about your first solo exhibition in a commercial gallery?
“Big Deal,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58″ x 38″
A: Although I had exhibited in a number of non-profit galleries in Virginia, Washington, DC, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York, my first solo in a commercial gallery was at 479 Gallery, 520 Broadway, in July 1996. The previous summer I had entered a juried exhibition there. My work won first prize and I was awarded a solo show.
This exhibition was soon followed by representation at an important New York gallery, Brewster Fine Arts, at 41 West 57th Street. I had my first two-person exhibition at Brewster in October 1996. The gallery specialized in art by Latin American artists. Besides myself, the sole non-Latina represented by Brewster was Leonora Carrington. I quickly began exhibiting alongside a group of illustrious artists: Leonora, Rufino Tamayo, Francisco Toledo, Francisco Zuniga, and other Latin American masters. I could hardly believe my good fortune!
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Pearls from artists* # 120
In the studio, Photo: Britta Konau
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
In solitude artists can experiment, make a mess, sustain notes for the joy of it, imagine themselves on any stage in any play. In the studio or practice room, they are not on display and need not wear their public face. They can be their silent selves, their worst selves. If there is unfreedom on the stage or in the gallery, there is freedom in the studio. As the visual artist Allen Kaprow put it, “Artists’ studios do not look like galleries, and when an artist’s studio does, everyone is suspicious.” Galleries are for show; studios are where messes are made and where the real work happens.
Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts
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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.
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Q: How long have you been working in your current studio?
Barbara in her studio; Photo: Elliott Jones
A: I have been in my West 29th Street space for seventeen years, but from the beginning, in the mid-1980’s, I had a studio. My first one was in the spare bedroom of the Alexandria, Virginia, house that I shared with Bryan and that I still own. For about three years in the 1990s I had a studio on the third floor of the Torpedo Factory Art Center, a building in Alexandria that is open to the public. People come in, watch artists work, and occasionally buy a piece of art.
In April 997 an opportunity to move to New York arose and I didn’t look back. By then I was showing in a good 57th Street gallery, Brewster Arts Ltd. (the gallery focused exclusively on Latin American artists; I was thrilled with the company I was in; the only fellow non-Latina represented by owner, Mia Kim, was Leonora Carrington), and I had managed to find a New York agent, Leah Poller, with whom to collaborate. I looked at only one other space before finding my West 29th Street studio. An old friend of Bryan’s from Cal Tech rented the space next door and he had told us it was available. Initially the studio was a sublet. The lease-holder was a painter headed to northern California to work temporarily for George Lucas at the Lucas Ranch. After several years she decided to stay so I was able to take over the lease.
My studio continues to be an oasis in a chaotic city, a place to make art, to read, and to think. I love to walk in the door every morning and always feel more calm the moment I arrive. It’s my absolute favorite place in New York!
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Pearls from artists* # 83
West 29th Street 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.
The world can make no response to meet art. Praise can miss the point as much as a casual remark such as I heard last night: an impeccably turned-out gentleman bounding up the stairs to the gallery exclaimed over his shoulder, “And now to see the minimalist – or maximalist!” He had all the relish of a casually greedy person with a tasty tidbit in view; he was on his way to gulp down my life with as little consideration as he would an artichoke heart.
Do I wish, can I afford, in my own limitations, to continue to make work that has such a high psychic cost and stands in jeopardy of being so met? Do I have a choice? I do not know. Neither whether I can further endure, nor whether I can stop. The work is preemptory. My life has led me to an impasse.
Anne Truitt in Turn: The Journal of an Artist
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Q: Can you talk about the studios you have worked in over the years?
Studio entrance
A: From the beginning in the mid-1980’s I had a studio. My first one was in the spare bedroom of the Alexandria, Virginia, house that I shared with Bryan and that I still own. For about three years in the 1990s I had a studio on the third floor of the Torpedo Factory Art Center, a building in Alexandria that is open to the public; people come in and watch the artists work. In 1997 an opportunity to move to New York arose and I didn’t look back. By then I was showing in a good 57th Street gallery, Brewster Arts Ltd. (the gallery focused exclusively on Latin American artists; I was thrilled with the company I was in; the only fellow non-Latina represented by owner, Mia Kim, was Leonora Carrington), and I had managed to find a New York agent, Leah Poller, with whom to collaborate. I looked at one other space before finding my West 29th Street studio, where I still work. It was and continues to be my oasis in a chaotic city, a place to make art, to read, and to think. I feel more calm the moment I walk in.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists * # 20
“The Magical Other,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 1993, 48″ x 38″
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
If, indeed, for any given time only a certain sort of work resonates with life, then that is the work you need to be doing in that moment. If you try to do some other work, you will miss your moment. Indeed, our own work is so inextricably tied to time and place that we cannot recapture even our own aesthetic ground of past times. Try, if you can, to reoccupy your own aesthetic space of a few years back, or even a few months. There is no way. You can only plunge ahead, even when that carries with it the bittersweet realization that you have already done your best work.
This heightened self-consciousness was rarely an issue in earlier times when it seemed self-evident that the artist (and everyone else, for that matter) had roots deeply intertwining their culture. Meanings and distinctions embodied within artworks were part of the fabric of everyday life, and the distance from art issues to all other issues was small. The whole population counted as audience when artists’ work encompassed everything from icons for the Church to utensils for the home. In the Greek amphitheater twenty-two hundred years ago, the plays of Euripides were performed as contemporary theater before an audience of fourteen thousand. Not so today.
Today art issues have for the most part become solely the concern of artists, divorced from – and ignored by – the larger community. Today artists often back away from engaging the times and places of their life, choosing instead the largely intellectual challenge of engaging the times and places of Art. But it’s an artificial construct that begins and ends at the gallery door. Apart from the readership of Artforum, remarkably few people lose sleep trying to incorporate gender-neutral biomorphic deconstructivism into their personal lives. As Adam Gopnik remarked in The New Yorker, “Post-modernist art is, above all, post-audience art.”
David Bayles & Ted Orland, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards)of Artmaking
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Q: What is the reality of the art world today? Do people experience it enough?
Aug 2
Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust
West 29th Street studio
A: I cannot comment on the art world today or the experience of other people. I can only speak for myself. I am completely devoted to my work; my entire life revolves around art. When I’m not in my studio creating, I am reading about art, thinking about it, gaining inspiration from other artists and from artistic travel, working out new ideas, going to museum and gallery exhibitions, trying to understand the business side of things, etc. Art is a calling and I personally experience it enough as my work continues to evolve!
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Posted in An Artist's Life, Art in general, Black Paintings, Creative Process, Inspiration, New York, NY, Pastel Painting, Photography, Studio, Working methods
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