Blog Archives
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* # 640
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
When an artist changes and develops over the years, as is natural to any creative person, such change is met by howls of protest from the marketers. Sometimes an artist (or teacher, scientist, or spiritual guru) starts with something extraordinary, becomes a star, and then their gift is either frozen or perverted.
The growing and risky edge of creative work is devalued, treated as a frill or extracurricular activity decorating the routine of ordinary life. There are few mechanisms available for the artist to construct a self-sustaining way of living and working. “One gathers,” says Virginia Woolf,
“from the enormous modern literature of confession and self-analysis that to write a book of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer’s mind whole and entire. Generally, material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down. Further, accentuating all these difficulties and making them harder to bear is the world’s notorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them. It does not care whether Flaubert finds the right word or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this or that fact. Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not want. And so the writer, Keats, Flaubert, Carlyle, suffers, especially in the creative years of youth, every form of distraction and discouragement. A curse, a cry of agony, rises from those books of analysis and confession. “Mighty poems in their misery dead” – that is the burden of their song. If anything comes through in spite of all this, it is a miracle, and probably no book is born entire and uncrippled as it was conceived.”
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Art and Life
Comments are welcome!
Q: Why art? (Question from “Arts Illustrated”)
A: I love this question! I remember being impressed by Ursula von Rydingsvard’s exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts a few years ago. What stayed with me most was her wall text, “Why Do I Make Art by Ursula von Rydingsvard.” There she listed two dozen benefits that art-making has brought to her life.
I want to share some of my own personal reasons for art-making here, in no particular order. My list keeps changing, but these are true at least for today.
1. Because I love the entire years-long creative process – from foreign travel whereby I discover new source material, to deciding what I will make, to the months spent in the studio realizing my ideas, to packing up my newest pastel painting and bringing it to my Virginia framer’s shop, to seeing the framed piece hanging on a collector’s wall, to staying in touch with collectors over the years and learning how their relationship to the work changes.
2. Because I love walking into my studio in the morning and seeing all of that color! No matter what mood I am in, my spirit is immediately uplifted.
3. Because my studio is my favorite place to be… in the entire world. I’d say that it is my most precious creation. It’s taken more than twenty-two years to get it this way. I hope I never have to move!
4. Because I get to listen to my favorite music all day.
5. Because when I am working in the studio, if I want, I can tune out the world and all of its urgent problems. The same goes for whatever personal problems I am experiencing.
6. Because I am devoted to my medium. How I use pastel continually evolves. It’s exciting to keep learning about its properties and to see what new techniques will develop.
7. Because I have been given certain gifts and abilities and that entails a sacred obligation to USE them. I could not live with myself were I to do otherwise.
8. Because art-making gives meaning and purpose to my life. I never wake up in the morning wondering, how should I spend the day? I have important work to do and a place to do it. I know this is how I am supposed to be spending my time on earth.
9. Because I have an enviable commute. To get to my studio it’s a thirty-minute walk, often on the High Line early in the morning before throngs of tourists have arrived.
10. Because life as an artist is never easy. It’s a continual challenge to keep forging ahead, but the effort is also never boring.
11. Because each day in the studio is different from all the rest.
12. Because I love the physicality of it. I stand all day. I’m always moving and staying fit.
13. Because I have always been a thinker more than a talker. I enjoy and crave solitude. I am often reminded of the expression, “She who travels the farthest, travels alone.” In my work I travel anywhere.
14. Because spending so much solitary time helps me understand what I think and feel and to reflect on the twists and turns of my unexpected and fascinating life.
15. Because I learn about the world. I read and do research that gets incorporated into the work.
16. Because I get to make all the rules. I set the challenges and the goals, then decide what is succeeding and what isn’t. It is working life at its most free.
17. Because I enjoy figuring things out for myself instead of being told what to do or how to think.
18. Because despite enormous obstacles, I am still able to do it. Art-making has been the focus of my life for thirty-nine years – I was a late bloomer – and I intend to continue as long as possible.
19. Because I have been through tremendous tragedy and deserve to spend the rest of my life doing exactly what I love. The art world has not caught up as much as I would like yet, but so be it. This is my passion and my life’s work and nothing will change that.
20. Because thanks to the internet and via social media, my work can be seen in places I have never been to and probably will never go.
21. Because I would like to be remembered. The idea of leaving art behind for future generations to appreciate and enjoy is appealing.
Comments are welcome!
Q: Did you formally study art? (Question from “Cultured Focus Magazine”)
A: My bachelor’s degree in Psychology is from the University of Vermont. I did not formally study art, unless you want to count the several years-worth of drawing and painting classes I took at the Art League School in Alexandria, VA. I never went to art school so do not have a bachelor’s or master’s degree in art.
Much later, in the early 2000s, I was compelled to study photography at the International Center of Photography in New York. This is a rather long story.
On September 11, 2001, my husband Bryan Jack, a high-ranking federal government employee, a brilliant economist and a budget analyst at the Pentagon, was on his way to present his monthly guest lecture in economics at the Naval Postgraduate College in Monterey, CA. He was a passenger on the plane that departed from Dulles Airport and was high-jacked and crashed into the Pentagon.
Losing Bryan on 9/11 was the biggest shock of my life, devastating in every way imaginable. We were soulmates and newly married. I have lived with his loss every single day for more than twenty years now. Life has never been the same.
In the summer of 2002 I was beginning to feel ready to get back to work. Learning about photography and cameras became essential avenues to my well-being.
My first challenge was learning how to use Bryan’s 4 x 5 view camera. Bryan had always taken the 4 x 5 negatives from which I derived the reference photos that were essential tools for making pastel paintings. I enrolled in a one-week view camera workshop at the International Center of Photography in New York. Surprisingly, it was very easy. I had derived substantial technical knowledge just from watching Bryan for many years.
After the view camera workshop, I decided to throw myself into learning this new medium, beginning with Photography I. I spent the next few years taking many classes at ICP and learning as much as I could. Eventually, I learned how to use Bryan’s extensive collection of film cameras, to properly light the setups that served as subject material for my “Domestic Threats” pastel paintings, and to make my own large chromogenic prints in a darkroom.
Then in October 2009 I was invited to present a solo photography exhibition at a gallery in New York. Continuing to make art after Bryan’s death had seemed like such an impossibility. I remember thinking how proud he would have been to know I became a good photographer.
Comments are welcome!
Q: How large is your collection of Mexican folk art objects?
Part of my collection
A: I began collecting these figures in the early 1990s. I haven’t counted them, but my guess is that I have amassed around 200 pieces of various sizes. This includes some Guatemalan figures. I went to Guatemala in 2009 and 2010. Since I divide my time between a house in Alexandria, VA, an apartment in Manhattan, and a studio in Chelsea, a portion of my folk art collection resides in each of these places.
Since 2017 I have been creating pastel paintings in the “Bolivianos” series, which exclusively use my photographs of Bolivian Carnival masks as source material. Occasionally, I will add one of my smaller Mexican or Guatemalan figures to improve and enrich a painting’s composition. Otherwise, my Mexican collection sits gathering dust. My thinking and my ideas, not to mention my travels, have evolved and just naturally moved on with time.
Comments are welcome!
Q: How has photography changed your approach to painting?
Untitled chromogenic print, 24″ x 24″ on 30″ x 40″ Fujicolor crystal archives paper, edition of 5
A: From the beginning in the 1980s I used photographs as reference material and my late husband, Bryan, would shoot 4” x 5” negatives of my elaborate setups using 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. Starting 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 and color I had 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. Photographs – from the initial impulse to create a setup to hanging a framed chromogenic print on the wall – can be made in minutes.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 608
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
There is in all of these forms of expression a unitive experience that is the essence of the creative mystery. The heart of improvisation is the free play of consciousness as it draws, writes, paints, and plays with the raw material emerging from the unconscious. Such play entails a certain degree of risk.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 600
*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 am always between two currents of thought: first the material difficulties, turning round and round and round to make a living; and second, the study of color. I am always hoping to make a discovery here, to express the feelings of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibrations of kindred tones. To express the thought behind a brow by radiance of a bright tone against a somber background. To express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset glow.
Vincent van Gogh quoted by Stephen Nachmanovitch in “Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
Comments are welcome!
Q: You make it look effortless when we know it is not. Would you explain how you started your blog 11 years ago? (Question from Colette C. McBratney via Facebook)
An Early Blog Post, Above
A: My blog turned 11 on July 15th. To learn how to set up, publish, and maintain a blog, I took a class at the International Center of Photography in New York. It was called “The Daily Blog” and that’s where I learned how to work with WordPress.
I decided to use a question and answer format because I had a backlog of material from interviews I had done over the years. During the class, which lasted five weeks, I published blog posts every day. Once the class ended, I cut back to a more manageable schedule of publishing posts twice a week.
Writing about my work quickly became an important part of my creative process. As most people probably know, I am very persistent so these days I just make sure to keep going!
Comments are welcome!
Q: The first pastel painting you see every morning when you arrive at your studio is “Myth Meets Dream.” It must have special meaning. Would you elaborate? (Question suggested by Marlissa Gardner via Facebook)
A: “Myth Meets Dream,” an early pastel painting from the “Domestic Threats” series, is one I have never wanted to sell. It marks the first time I included Mexican folk art figures in my work. In 1992 as a Christmas present, my future sister-in-law sent the two Oaxacan painted wooden figures you see depicted above – the blue winged creature and the red, white, and black figure behind it. The other three figures in this painting are hand-puppets.
Previously, I had been creating elaborate staged photographs in my Alexandria house using stuffed animals and hand-puppets. (The latter were made by a company called “Folk Tails”). I used the photos as reference material for pastel paintings. In other words, rather than work exclusively from life, I mostly looked at these photos while I made the painting. Although I have simplified my process since those early days, I still create pastel paintings using reference photographs.
In “Myth Meets Dream” you can see both puppets and my then new Oaxacan folk art figures. This pastel painting marks an important transition in subject matter and was the start of decades-worth of foreign travel, study, adventure, hard work, and yes, fun. It’s true that “Myth Meets Dream” hangs in my studio and is the first thing I see every morning. It brings back so many precious memories.
Every painting has a story!
If you’re interested to learn more, please see https://barbararachko.art/en/art-market
Comments are welcome!
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