Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 655
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
My creative friends are some of the most hard-working, motivated people I know. While many non-artists have nine-to-five jobs and then relax at home, our work is never done. Yet, we are bombarded with tropes in books, movies, and television suggesting that we have chosen a ‘slacker’ profession. Even wildly successful artists can have family members who think they are self-absorbed, or that they should ‘get a real job.’ According to genius and award-winning filmmaker, Werner Herzog, his brother still routinely makes fun of his profession (Brooks, 2020). Some may call us selfish and tell us that we are only looking for attention, or feeding our egos. They may ask, “When are you going to grow up?” or ignorantly proclaim, “How nice it must be to only work when you want to.” Regardless of intention, this is not support.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
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Pearls from artists* # 629
Barbara’s 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.
I kept coming back to [Ellen] Dissanayake. She’s for banning the word art altogether on the grounds it’s uselessly vague, and argues we shouldn’t treat art as a thing but as a behavior. Art, she claims, occurs anytime we take ordinary things and transform them into extraordinary experiences through a process she calls “making special.” Making special happens when words turn into poetry, flesh gets painted for a shaman’s ceremony, a B-flat meets a middle G to form the tune in a Peking opera. I liked her definition, which seemed less arbitrary than others I’d read and didn’t turn up its nose at blockbuster movies or Super Bowl halftime shows – which Dissanayake calls “the arts of our time.” As she sees it, art results from several key “operations” … Artists repeat… formalize… exaggerate… elaborate… and manipulate expectation… Break dancing, leading a tea ceremony, designing Grand Theft Auto – to Dissanayake, it’s art, art, and more art.
Bianca Bosker in Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See
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Q: Tell us about any other interests you may have besides your art practice. Does it get reflected in your art? (Question from artamour)
A: Travel is arguably the best education there is. My travels around the world, supplemented with lots of research once I return home, are an important part of my creative process. This is how I develop ideas to forge a way ahead. It is difficult and solitary work.
Even though I became an artist later in life, travel as a source of inspiration found ME. And it has been a blessing! People around the world have become fans. Many send messages of thanks saying they are proud that some aspect of their country’s culture has inspired my work. I am always grateful and touched to know this.
I love old movies, especially early silent films, classic noir and horror films from the 1930s and 1940s, and anything by Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Wells. Probably this interest is most evident in the way I composed and designed pastel paintings in my early “Domestic Threats” series. I’m not sure it’s discernible in subsequent work.
Another passion is swimming. Four times a week I swim at a local pool. I love it! In my view swimming laps is the best exercise to help maintain fitness and to prepare for the focus and physicality I need in the studio.
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Q: I have been always fascinated with the re-contexualizing power of Art and with the way some objects or even some concepts often gain a second life when they are “transduced” on a canvas or in a block of marble. So I would like to ask you if in your opinion, personal experience is an absolutely indespensable part of a creative process. Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?
Barbara’s studio
A: Certainly personal experience is an indispensable and inseparable part of the creative process. For me art and life are one and I suspect that is true for most artists. When I look at each of my pastel paintings I can remember what was going on in my life at the time I made it. Each is a sort of veiled autobiography waiting to be decoded and in a way, each is also a time-capsule of the larger zeitgeist. It’s still a mystery how exactly this happens but all lived experience – what’s going on in the world, books I’m reading and thinking about, movies I’ve seen that have stayed with me, places I’ve visited, etc. – overtly and/or not so obviously, finds its way into the work.
Life experience also explains why the work I do now is different from my work even five years ago. In many ways I am not the same person.
The inseparableness of art and life is one reason that travel is so important to my creative process. Artists always seek new influences that will enrich and change our work. To be an artist, indeed to be alive, is to never stop learning and growing.
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Pearls from artists* # 34
On the High Line
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store.
In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the king’s army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of monuments, department stores, mammals, wonders of nature, methods of transport, works of art, and other classified treasures from around the globe.
Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image. Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern.
Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
Susan Sontag in On Photography
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Q: There is a voyeuristic quality to your paintings in the “Domestic Threats” series. Perhaps it is because we are seeing objects most would consider inanimate acting out these complex scenes you’ve created for them. Where do the stories come from?
“He Didn’t Take Seriously the Threat From Below,” soft pastel on sandpaper
A: When I set up the figures to photograph, I make up stories about what is happening. Being an artist has lots of negatives, but one of the fun parts is that sometimes we get to act like big kids. Some of the stories come from movies, mythology, folk tales, or dreams. I read a lot and I love stories. I try to be open to all sorts of influences because you never know what will work its way in to enrich your art.
Q: What do your collectors have in common?
“She Braced Herself for Their Show of Force” at Jim and Judy’s; photo by Judy Bexfield
A: Collectors of my work typically range in age from about 40 to 70, they are college graduates with advanced degrees, they often don’t have kids, which is why they have disposable income and time to pursue their interests in art and culture. When I meet them (presuming my work was sold through a gallery or other third party), we usually have much to talk about – art, art history, photography, cinema, film history, dance, drama, music, travel, archaeology, Mexico, Central and South America, Bali – the list goes on and on.
barbararachkoscoloreddust.com 