Blog Archives
Travel photo* of the month
Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India
* Favorite travel photos that have not yet appeared in this blog.
Comments are welcome!
Travel photo of the month*
Selling greens to feed to sacred cows, Pushkar, Rajasthan, India
* Favorite travel photos that have not yet appeared in this blog.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 375
Tile worker in South India
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
With the camera you interpret reality. Photography is not truth. The photographer interprets reality and, above all, constructs his own reality according to his own awareness or his own emotions. Sometimes it’s complicated because it’s a kind of schizophrenic phenomenon. Without the camera, you see the world in one way, with the camera, in another. Through the window, you’re composing, and even dreaming about, this reality as if, through the camera, you were synthesizing what you are with what you’ve learned of a certain place. Then you make your own image, your own interpretation. The same thing happens to a writer as to a photographer. It’s impossible to capture the truth of life.
Graciela Iturbide in Eyes to Fly With: Portraits, Self-Portraits, and Other Photographs
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Q: You are a multi-talented woman! Tell us about your book, “From Pilot to Painter,” and how writing, for you, compares to painting and photography. Which do you prefer?
“From Pilot to Painter”
A: I am pleased that my eBook FROM PILOT TO PAINTER is available on Amazon and iTunes. It is based on my blog and is part memoir, including my personal loss on 9/11, insights into my creative practice, and intimate reflections on what it’s like to be an artist living in New York City now. The eBook includes new material not found on the blog, plus 25+ reproductions of my vibrant pastel-on-sandpaper paintings, a Foreword by Ann Landi (who writes for ARTnews and The Wall Street Journal), and more.
“Barbara Rachko’s Colored Dust” (the title of my blog) continues to be a crucial part of my overall art practice. Blogging twice a week forces me to think deeply about my work and to explain it clearly to others. The process has helped me develop a better understanding about why I make art and has encouraged me to become a better writer.
From the beginning in the 1980s I used photographs as reference material and Bryan would shoot 4” x 5” negatives of my elaborate setups with his Toyo-Omega view camera. In those days I rarely picked up a camera except when we were traveling. After Bryan was killed on 9/11, I inherited his extensive camera collection – old Nikons, Leicas, Graphlex cameras, etc. – and I wanted to learn how to use them. In 2002 I enrolled in a series of photography courses (about 10 over 4 years) at the International Center of Photography in New York. I learned how to use all of Bryan’s cameras and how to make my own big color prints in the darkroom. Along the way I discovered that the sense of composition, form, and color I developed over many years as a painter translated well into photography. The camera was just another medium with which to express my ideas. Astonishingly, in 2009 I had my first solo photography exhibition in New York.
It’s wonderful to be both a painter and a photographer. Pastel painting will always be my first love, but photography lets me explore ideas much faster than I ever could as a painter. Paintings take months of work. To me, photographs – from the initial impulse to hanging a framed print on the wall – are instant gratification.
For two years I have been using my iPad Pro to capture thousands of travel photographs. Most recently, I visited Gujarat and Rajasthan in India. I have never been inclined to use a sketchbook so composing photos on my iPad keeps my eye sharp while I’m halfway around the world, far from my studio practice.
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Travel photo of the month*
Victoria Station, Mumbai, India, targeted in the November 26, 2008 terrorist attack.
*Favorite travel photos that have not yet appeared in this blog.
Comments are welcome!
Travel photo of the month*
Thar Desert, Rajasthan, India
*Favorite travel photographs that have not yet appeared in this blog
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 365
Ahmedabad, India
* 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 important thing is the intersection between intuition and discipline, because you have to be alert and at the same time invisible. The eye has to be alert and capture very quickly everything you have inside you – I don’t know how to explain it. What the eye sees is the synthesis of what you are or what you’ve learned to do, this is the language of photography…
Graciela Iturbide in Eyes to Fly With: Portraits, Self-Portraits, and Other Photographs
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 363
Thar Desert, Rajasthan, India
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Beauty seems to need quiet and take patience, both to create it and to experience it.
If our minds are filled with a long and urgent “to do” list, we are not likely to slow down enough to appreciate anything but the next line we can draw through our never-ending list. Yet every now and again something stops us. It arrests our constant external activity and search. We can be stopped by the way the light filters through the trees in our backyard or hits a bowl of fruit on our kitchen table. And we are silenced, even if momentarily. We can be stopped by cave paintings as easily as by a thirteenth-century tapestry or a fifteenth-century Italian painting. We may be impressed by the craft of the artist, but almost always what moves us most deeply is the beauty that is expressed by the craft.
In the face of beauty, we are silenced because beauty expresses silence. In lavishing attention on the object of the artwork, the consciousness of the artist can touch something divine, some transcendental quality, and that transcendent element now resides in the artwork. How do we know it? We feel it. We experience it. Our heart responds to that sublime quality the artist infused into the work.
Ian Roberts in Creative Authenticity: 16 Principles to Clarify and Deepen Your Artistic Vision
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Pearls from artists* # 357
Udaipur, India
*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 term hermeneutics has been used to describe the task of understanding and interpreting ideas and texts. In a similar way, we need to set for ourselves the task of developing a hermeneutic of the visible, addressing the problem of how we understand and interpret what we see, not only in the classical images and art forms created by the various religious traditions, but in the ordinary images of people’s traditions, rites, and daily activities which are presented to us through the film-image.
Rudolph Arnheim, in his extensive work on visual perception, has shown that the dichotomy between seeing and thinking which runs through much of the Western tradition, is a very problematic one. In Visual Thinking, he contends that visual perception is integrally related to thought. It is not the case, according to Arnheim, that the eyes present a kind of raw data to the mind which, in turn, processes it and refines it by thought. Rather, those visual images are the shapers and bearers of thought. Jan Gonda, in writing on the Vedic notion dhi, sometimes translated as “thought,” finds similarly that the semantic fields of the word in Vedic literature does not correspond as much to our words for “thinking” as it does to our notions of “insight,” “vision,” and “seeing.” Suzanne Langer has also written of the integral relation of thought to the images we see in the “mind’s eye.” The making of all of those images is the fundamental “imaginative” human activity. One might add that it is the fundamental activity of the religious imagination as well. She writes, “Images are, therefore, our readiest instruments for abstracting concepts from the tumbling streams of actual impressions.”
Diana L. Eck in Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India
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Travel photo of the month*
Riding a camel in India’s Thar Desert
*Favorite travel photographs that have not yet appeared in this blog
Comments are welcome!
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