Blog Archives
Q: Who is your favorite artist and why?
Catalogue of Matisse’s late work
A: I admire the work of many artists, but if I have to choose only one then I’d say Matisse. Whenever there is a Matisse exhibition in New York, I try to see it at least once. Many years ago I read Hillary Spurling’s definitive two-volume biography (The Unknown Matisse, published 1998, and Matisse the Master, 2005) and became fascinated with how his life unfolded, how Matisse struggled and overcame daunting obstacles in order to make art, and how his work continued to grow and evolve throughout his long life.
I believe that Matisse and I are kindred souls in three respects: we both came from unpromising beginnings (he from a textile family in northern France, me from a blue collar family in New Jersey), our fathers did not support our interest in becoming artists, and he famously worked in series (I am well into my third series).
Comments are welcome!
Q: Do you have any advice for a young painter or someone just starting out as an artist?
Studio
A: As artists each of us has at least two important responsibilities: to express things we are feeling for which there are no adequate words and to communicate to a select few people, who become our audience. By virtue of his or her own uniqueness, every human being has something to say. But self-expression by itself is not enough. As I often say, at it’s core art is communication. Without this element there is no art. When artists fail to communicate, perhaps they haven’t mastered their medium sufficiently so are unsuccessful in the attempt, or they may be being self-indulgent and not trying. Admittedly there is that rare and most welcome occurrence when an artistic statement – such as a personal epiphany – happens for oneself alone.
Most importantly, always listen to what your heart tells you. It knows and speaks the truth and becomes easier to trust as you mature. If you get caught up in the art world, step back and take some time to regain your bearings, to get reacquainted with the voice within you that knows the truth. Paint from there. Do not ever let a dealer or anyone else dictate what or how you should paint.
With perhaps the singular exception of artist-run cooperative galleries, be very suspicious of anyone who asks for money to put your work in an exhibition. These people are making money from desperate and confused artists, not from appreciative art collectors. With payment already in hand there is no financial incentive whatsoever for these people to sell your paintings and they won’t.
Always work in a beautiful and special place of your own making. It doesn’t need to be very large, unless you require a large space in which to create, but it needs to be yours. I’m thinking of Virginia Woolf’s “a room of one’s own” here. A studio is your haven, a place to experiment, learn, study, and grow. A studio should be a place you can’t wait to enter and once you are there and engaged, are reluctant to leave.
Be prepared to work harder than you ever have, unrelentingly developing your special innate gifts, whether you are in the mood to do so or not. Most of all remember to do it for love, because you love your medium and it’s endless possibilities, because you love working in your studio, and because you feel most joyously alive when you are creating.
Comments are welcome!
Q: How would you describe your personal artistic style?
Barbara’a pastels
A: Regardless of what medium I am using, I am first and foremost a colorist. Everything I create is vibrant with color.
The Navy taught me to be organized, goal-oriented and focused, to love challenges, and in everything I do, to pay attention to the details. Trying to make it as an artist in New York is nothing BUT challenges, so these qualities serve me well, whether I am creating paintings, shooting and making photographs, or trying to understand the art business, keep up with social media, and manage all the tasks required of a busy artist with a New York studio, a business, and two residences to maintain. It’s a lot, but it forces me to continually learn and grow. As Helen Keller famously said, “Life is an adventure or it is nothing.”
These days I am rarely bored. I thoroughly enjoy spending long, solitary hours working to become a better artist. I am meticulous about craft and will not let work out of my studio until it is as good as I can make it. My creative process is more exciting than ever. It’s thrilling and energizing to continually push soft pastel to its limits and use it in ways that no other artist has done before!
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 58
Cabo San Lucas, Mexico
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
I remember as a teenager having a group of friends at school and another group whom I spent the weekends with. I functioned fine until on occasions when I was with friends from both groups at the same time. Then it became really difficult, because I was used to acting very differently with the two groups. With one I was the leader, very vocal and outspoken about my opinions. With the other group I wanted desperately to belong and so I adapted to fit in, which meant not really being myself.
The lack of authenticity is painful. It applies to all levels of life. If our voice as a painter is inauthentic, we’re in trouble. In the end there is nothing so compelling as to be yourself. This is why being an artist can be so exhilarating. If you want to uncover your truth, you have a daily technique to come to terms with your limitations and to overcome them. You have an opportunity to look at the limiting stories you have written in your head and heart and rewrite them with boldness and vision. The quality of your attention influences how you see things.
What you put your attention on grows stronger in your life. Life, if you look around you, whether inside or in nature, is one bubbling mass of creativity. Recognize we have no shortage of it. If you focus your attention on what you now decide is fundamental , that quality will grow in your life. Not what our parents or teachers or friends or media or anybody says or said. What we now put our attention on will grow in our life. If you want to paint and put your focus there you will unleash a torrent of energy and enthusiasm.
Ian Roberts in Creative Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 51
Road to Roden Crater in Arizona
* 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 most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadily along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity. As in any profession, facility develops. In most this is a decided advantage, and so it is with the actual facture of art; I notice with interest that my hand is more deft, lighter, as I grow more experienced. But I find that I have to resist the temptation to fall into the same kind of pleasurable relaxation I once enjoyed with clay. I have in some subtle sense to fight my hand if I am to grow along the reaches of my nerve.
And here I find myself faced with two fears. The first is simply that of the unknown – I cannot know where my nerve is going until I venture along it. The second is less sharp but more permeating: the logical knowledge that the nerve of any given individual is as limited as the individual. Under its own law, it may just naturally run out. If this happens, the artist does best, it seems to me, to fall silent. But by now the habit of work is so ingrained in me that I do not know if I could bear the silence.
Anne Truitt in Daybook: The Journal of an Artist
Q: To be a professional visual artist is to have two full-time jobs because an artist must continually balance the creative and the business sides of things. How do you manage to be so productive?
No computer in sight
A: With social media and other new ways of doing business, managing it all is getting more difficult every day. Bear in mind that I say this as someone who does not have the extra time commitment of a day job, nor do I have children or other family members to care for. I have no idea how other visual artists, who may have these responsibilities and more, keep up with all the tasks that need to be done. In The Artist’s Guide: How to Make A Living Doing What You Love, Jackie Battenfield lists a few of them (believe me, there are others):
…being an artist isn’t just about making art. You have many other responsibilities – managing a studio, looking for opportunities, identifying an audience for your work, caring for and protecting what you have created, and securing money, time, and space – in addition to whatever is happening in your personal life.
To begin with I try to maintain regular studio hours. I generally work on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and once I’m at the studio I stay there for a minimum of 7 hours. To paint I need daylight so in the spring and summer my work day tends to be longer. My pastel-on-sandpaper paintings are extremely labor-intensive. I need to put in sufficient hours in order to accomplish anything. When I was younger I used to work in my studio 6 days a week, 9 hours or more a day. I have more commitments now, and can no longer work 60+ hours a week, but I still try to stick to a schedule. And once I’m at the studio I concentrate on doing the creative work, period.
I am productive when I keep the business and creative sides physically separate., ie., no computers, iPads, etc. are allowed into the studio. Recently I tried an experiment. I brought my iPad to the studio, thinking, “Surely I am disciplined enough to use it only during my lunch break.” But no, I wasted so much time checking email, responding to messages on Facebook, etc., when I should have been focusing on solving problems with the painting that was on my easel. I learned a good lesson that day and won’t bring my iPad to the studio again.
As has long been my practice, I concentrate on business tasks when I get home in the evening and on my, so called, days off. After a day spent working in the studio, I generally spend a minimum of two to three hours more to answer email, apply for exhibitions, work on my blog, email images to people who need them, etc. At present I have part-time help with social media – the talented Barbra Drizin, of Start from Scratch Social Media – although my time commitment there is growing, too, as more details need my attention.
No one ever said it would be easy being a professional artist, but then again, I would not choose to spend my days any other way. As I often say, “Being an artist is a calling. Contrary to popular belief, it is NOT a life for wimps… or slackers.”
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 17
Boat hull
* 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 better you know yourself, the more you will know when you are playing to your strengths and when you are sticking your neck out. Venturing out of your comfort zone may be dangerous, yet you do it anyway because our ability to grow is directly proportional to an ability to entertain the uncomfortable.
… Another thing about knowing who you are is that you know what you should not be doing, which can save you a lot of heartaches and false starts if you catch it early on.
I was giving a lecture to students at Vassar not long ago. Working with the students’ autobiographies, I invited a dance student, a music student who brought his saxophone, and an art student to join me on stage. I asked the dancer to improvise some movement from a tuck position on the floor. I asked the saxophone player to accompany the dancer. And I asked the art student to assign colors to what they were doing. I admit I was constructing a three-ring circus in the lecture hall. But my goal was to bring the three students together by forcing them to work off the same page, and also to free them to discover how far they could go improvising on this simple assignment.
When I asked the art student to read out loud his color impressions, everyone in the hall was taken aback. He droned on and on about himself, feelings he’d had, stories about friends. Not a word about color. Finally I heard “limpid blue” come out of his mouth. I waved my arms, signaling him to stop reading.
“Do you realize,” I said, “that you’ve just recited about five hundred words in an assignment about color? You’ve covered everything under the sun, and ‘limpid blue’ is the first time you’ve mentioned a color. I’m not convinced you want to be a painter.”
As far as I was concerned, this young man was in “DNA denial.” I gave him a painterly exercise and he gave me a text heavy response. A young man with painting in his genes would be rattling off colors immediately. Instead, his vivid use of language – limpid blue does not come in tubes – suggested that he really ought to be a writer.
It would be presumptious of me to think I had him pegged for a writer, not a painter, after that brief encounter. But if I got him to reexamine what he’s built for, then he was a step or two ahead of most people.
Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use it for Life
Comments are welcome.
barbararachkoscoloreddust.com 
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 2014, 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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