Blog Archives
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.
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Q: What was it like having a documentary made about you? (Question from Culture Focus Magazine)
With Jennifer Cox at the 2023 Newport Beach Film Festival!
A: I loved the whole experience! Before this happened, I had wanted to make a film for ten years or so, ever since Brainard Carey, an artists’ coach, suggested the idea when I told him about my unusual background. Often I hear from artist friends and others that my life story is truly inspiring. Finally being able to make “Barbara Rachko: True Grit” and now to share it with a wider audience is a dream come true! Jennifer Cox, our director, and Annette Apitz, our co-producer, were ideal collaborators over the fifteen months it took to make the film.
It is truly gratifying to hear so many positive responses from viewers of our film. Surprisingly, the film has even gone on to have a life in film festivals. “Barbara Rachko: True Grit” made it’s World Premier at the prestigious 2023 Newport Beach Film Festival in Orange County, California, where it received both the Audience Award and the Best in category Award for Art, Architecture, and Design. In addition, we earned Honorable Mention at the 2023 International Fine Arts Film Festival Santa Barbara and were recognized as an Award Nominee at the 2023 Montreal Women Film Festival.
To date in 2024 our film has screened at New Plaza Cinema on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and at Noise Media Art Fair in Vienna, Austria. I think I speak for the filmmakers and myself when I say, “Barbara Rachko: True Grit” has exceeded all of our expectations!
Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJWLy84kXI0
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Pearls from artists* # 625
Downtown Manhattan
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Think of one of those rare, truly exceptional outings to the cinema. In the lobby afterward the experience elicits from us a language of paralysis and disappearance: “I forgot myself. It could have gone on forever.” Stepping out onto the street, we feel that somehow nothing is as it was before. The passing cars, the night sky above the glass towers, the streetlights reflected on the wet pavement: everything glows with a strange immediacy and newness. It is as if the film had done something to the world. A similar thing might happen when we put down a great novel or take in a powerful piece of music.
The Book of Revelation contains a memorable line: “Behold, I make all things new.” Reflecting on this ancient text, the critic Northrop Frye defined the Apocalypse as “the way the world looks once the ego has disappeared.” Every great artistic work is a quiet apocalypse. It tears off the veil of ego, replacing old impressions with new ones at once inexorably alien and profoundly meaningful. Great works of art have a unique capacity to arrest the discursive mind, raising it to a level of reality that is more expansive than the egoic dimension we normally inhabit. In this sense, art is the transfiguration of the world.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise,Critique, and Call to Action
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Q: Do you have any rituals that you do before beginning a day’s work in the studio?
The Studio!
A: When I arrive at the studio in the morning it’s rare for me to immediately start working. Usually I read something art-related – books written by artists, about creativity, etc. At the moment I’m reading The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art by Mark Rothko. As usual I am struggling to understand aspects of the art business and figure out what I need to do next to get my work seen and collected by a wider audience. The Artist’s Reality reminds me why I decided to make art in the first place. It helps reconnect with temporarily forgotten parts of myself and is a much-needed reminder of what I love about being an artist, especially in light of the business side that is becoming so complex and demanding of attention now.
Balancing the creative and business aspects of being an artist is a continual struggle. Both are so important. An artist needs an appreciative audience – very few artists devote their lives to art-making so that the work will remain in a closet – but I also believe this (from a note I wrote years ago and tacked to the studio wall): “Just make the work. None of the rest matters.”
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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 the following July.
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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Q: Many of the world’s cultures have a mask tradition. Is there something special about Bolivian masks that first attracted you to them?
Bolivian Carnival Mask
A: My subject matter emerges directly from my travels. I visited Bolivia in 2017. What I especially liked then – and now – about Bolivian Carnival masks, is that they include additional textures – feathers, fur, costume jewelry, sequins, fabric, etc. that add to their physical presence. Masks from most of the other countries I’ve visited tend to be made of wood and/or paper mache and nothing else. In my view such masks are not as dramatic nor do they offer much expressive potential. They feel dead. They lack a certain “soulfulness.”
Furthermore, textures are challenging to render in soft pastel. For more than three decades I have been striving to improve my pastel techniques. By now I have a vast repertoire from which to select. As was true in my earlier series, with “Bolivianos” an important personal goal is to keep adding to the repertoire.
It takes months to create a pastel painting, which means I need masks that will hold my attention every day over the course of three or four months. I never want to be bored in the studio. If I am bored while making the work, those feelings will be directly transferred and I will make a boring pastel painting, something I hope never to do! The masks need to have a really strong ‘presence.’ Then as I slowly make a pastel painting, one that is exciting to work on from start to finish, I can transform my subject into something surprising and powerful that has never existed before!
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Q: Can you explain how you choose colors? (Question from Maria Cox via Instagram)
A: I am wild about color! As I work to create a pastel painting, I apply a color, back up from my easel to see how it interacts with and affects the rest of the painting, and then I make revisions. This process necessitates countless color changes and hundreds of hours during months of work. I apply pastel using a meticulous layering process. Were you to x-ray one of them, the earlier, discarded versions of a pastel painting would be visible. All the while I carefully fine-tune and refine how the colors and shapes interact with each other.
The goal is to make an exciting painting that no one, especially me as the maker, has ever seen before. I have no desire to repeat myself, to make art that resembles work by any other artist, or to be forced into a niche.
I try to select intense, vibrant colors that are exciting to look at, that work well in relationship to each other, and that will grab the viewer. Sometimes I deliberately choose colors for their symbolic meanings. For example, I selected a dark purple for the alternating triangles (the ones with the pink dots above) in “Overlord” because purple denotes royalty.
I have been working with soft pastel for 37 years so I have a fairly intricate science of color at my disposal. No doubt, many unconscious factors are at play, too. More on that in future posts.
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Pearls from artists* # 542
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Observing these objects and imagining their history broadened my perspective. In China, we were still living in a culturally impoverished era, but art had not abandoned us – its roots were deeply planted in the weathered soil. The stubborn survival of this indigenous artistic tradition demonstrated that our narrow-minded authoritarian state would never be able to remake our culture in its own image. From then on, when I wasn’t spending time with my parents, I was immersing myself in the world of antiques. The dealers found me perplexing, for I followed no prevailing tastes or conventional wisdom. Instead I was taken with obscure objects, and made a point of buying things that seemed to have little or no value; my hungry spirit was nourished as I imagined the stories lurking behind each piece. The observations and insights that came to me from the distant past spurred me on to make art of my own.
– Ai Weiwei in 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
This is exactly my experience with the folk art I collect!
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Pearls from artists* # 534
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Today I am quoting myself:
I strive to always do what is best for my art practice. It’s difficult sometimes, but it’s important to ignore most of what other people say. They mean well, but advice to artists is often misguided, especially when it is unsolicited. Fortunately, our hearts are never wrong.
B. Rachko on a Facebook post
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Pearls from artists* # 524
*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 made a decision a long time ago to recite affirmations to myself every morning in order to stay on the right track. I first start out with The Lord’s Prayer, then I thank God for the blessings that have been bestowed on me, then I ask for preservation of health, and then close with a very purposeful statement about who I am and who I want to be. Affirming myself every morning is a very important part of my daily routine, because if I don’t know who I am, someone else will decide for me. You’ve got to know who you are and where you come from in order to get where you want to go! Believing in yourself and filling your mind and soul with purpose is essential to being able to create meaningful art.
Quincy Jones in the liner notes for We Are by Jon Batiste
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