Blog Archives
Q: Do you have any big projects coming up?
A: I certainly do! I have been a painter for forty years, and for most of that time, my work has been shaped by foreign travel. At seventy-two, I find myself thinking about legacy — what I want to leave behind. Documenting my creative process on film has become an essential part of this objective.
In the “Bolivianos” series, I have been creating pastel-on-sandpaper paintings that transform the vivid masks of the Bolivian Carnival into universal archetypes. I first encountered these masks at a museum in La Paz in 2017.
Circumstances have aligned perfectly for an exciting next step: another trip to Bolivia and a new documentary. Our upcoming film will be a follow-up to the award-winning “Barbara Rachko: True Grit” (released in 2023), marking a deeper exploration of my thirty-five-year engagement with folk art from Mexico, Central America, and South America.
(See https://youtu.be/JJWLy84kXI0?si=v7JHIq9ViYGgs76U)
In February 2026, I will return to Bolivia with a two-person film crew to experience Carnival firsthand — to immerse myself in its rhythm, history, and meaning. Recognized by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, this festival offers an extraordinary window into Bolivia’s cultural soul.
Our film will chronicle my journey as essential research — a vital continuation of my creative inquiry over these past decades. With this trip and film, I hope to create my next body of pastel-on-sandpaper paintings, rich with color, spirit, and the enduring vitality of Oruro’s Carnival.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 661
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Curiosity and wonder are essential to the art life. Curiosity drives us to look beneath the rocks that others pass by. Wonder helps us recognize the infinite potential of what we find there, so we might spin it into something remarkable. The concepts and visuals that attract me will likely not grab you, but therein lies the beauty. Your job is to keep excavating the things that intrigue you, feeding your head with new ideas. The objective is to build a singular mental stockpile of elements that make up your visual voice. Your brain then makes connections that others would never make because they have assembled a vastly different stockpile of ideas, images, experiences, concepts, beliefs, and concerns.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 405
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.
… art is an objective pursuit with the same claim to truth as science, albeit truth of a different order. At the very least the consistency and universality of aesthetic expression throughout history and around the globe suggest that the undertaking that finds its modern formulation in the concept of art is a distinct sphere of activity with its own ontology. My belief is that what the modern West calls art is the direct outcome of a basic human drive, an inborn expressivity that is inextricably bound with the creative imagination. It is less a product of culture than a natural process manifesting through the cultural sphere. One could go so far as to argue that art must exist in order for culture to emerge in the first place.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
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Pearls from artists* # 358
Elephanta Caves, 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.
According to [Rudolph] Arnheim, the way in which we reach out for and grasp the “object we see, either in our immediate range of perception or through the medium of photography, is dependent upon who we are and what we recognize from past experience.” The visual imprint of an image, an object, or a scene upon the eye is not at all “objective.” In the image-making process of thinking, we see, sort, and recognize according to the visual phenomenology of our own experience. What people notice in the “same” image – be it an image of a dancing Siva or a film of a Hindu festival procession – depends to some extent on what they can recognize from the visual experience of the past. In the case of film, of course, it also depends on what the photographer has seen and chosen to show us. Arnheim writes that the eye and the mind, working together in the process of cognition, cannot simply note down images that are “already there.” “We find instead that direct observation, far from being a mere ragpicker, is an exploration of the form-seeking, form-imposing mind, which needs to understand but cannot until it casts what it sees into manageable models.”
Diana L. Eck in Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India
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Pearls from artists* # 324
Untitled c-print, 24″ x 24,” edition of 5
*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 artist is the creator of beautiful things.” From [Immanuel] Kant’s perspective on conventional beauty, [Oscar] Wilde’s definition would seem to demote artists to a cosmetic role, turning them, as William Irwin Thompson said, into “the interior decorators of Plato’s cave.” On the other hand, under the terms of a radical beauty that brings forth the Real instead of pacifying us with delusions of “realism,” Wilde’s line can help restore art to its shamanic source in our minds. Perhaps it would have been better if Wilde had defined the artist as the creator of numinous things – of enchanted objects, omens, or talismans. Because if there is one thing that all beautiful things share, it is that they are all symbols. They are all transmissions from another plane of existence.
It is one thing to acknowledge the Beautiful as an objective property of the phenomenal world. It is another to stop and listen to what it has to say.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 320
“Offering,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 20″ x 26″
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
As soon as I use words and actions to convey an emotion, I engage with the world, pitting my feelings against fate in hopes of a desired outcome. If I am angry, my anger is directed at someone or something. If I am in love, my love is for another. Feelings are purposive in ordinary reality, our emotional states tangled in the processes of life. This is what we mean when we refer to ourselves as subjects. But if, instead of acting on a feeling, I make it the basis of a song or a film or a dance, something strange happens. My purposive feeling leaves the closed circle of my personal existence, almost as though I had taken it out of historical time altogether. Transposed into the work of art, it becomes nonpurposive, undirected. It disassociates from its original focus, and from my self as subject, acquires a kind of autonomy. Artistic creation allows for the subjective aspect of our lives normally locked inside our skulls to exist outside us, which is to say that in art, the subjective becomes objective.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 184
“Couple,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 20″ x 26″
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Do the poet and scientist not work analogously? Both are willing to waste effort. To be hard on himself is one of the main strengths of each. Each is attentive to clues, each must narrow the choice, must strive for perfection. As George Grosz says, “In art there is no place for gossip and but a small place for the satirist.” The objective is fertile procedure. Is it not? Jacob Bronkowski says in the Saturday Evening Post that science is not a mere collection of discoveries, but that science is the process of discovering. In any case it’s not established once and for all; it’s evolving.
Marianne Moore in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews Second Series
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Q: Can you describe your entire body of work in six words or less?
In the studio, Photo: Britta Konau
A: Only if I forget what it took to get me to this point! I remember all too well the long periods of study, hard work, self-doubt, self-nurturing, disappointments, setbacks, risks, focus, drive, discipline, joy, detours, fallow periods, rejections, perseverance, etc. that have gone into sustaining an art career for nearly thirty years. There are no blueprints and few role models for a successful artist’s life. (Even the meaning of “success” as an artist is difficult to define). I invite others, who surely can be more objective, to attempt a summation of my entire body of work in a few words.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 87
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.
One evening, after one false start too many, I just gave up. Sitting at a bar, feeling a bit burned out by work and by life in general, I just started drawing on the backs of business cards for no reason. I didn’t really need a reason. I just did it because it was there, because it amused me in a kind of random, arbitrary way.
Of course it was stupid. Of course it was not commercial. Of course it wasn’t going to go anywhere. Of course it was a complete and utter waste of time. But in retrospect, it was this built-in futility that gave it its edge. Because it was the exact opposite of all the “Big Plans” my peers and I were used to making. It was so liberating not to have to think about all of that, for a change.
It was so liberating to be doing something that didn’t have to have some sort of commercial angle, for a change.
It was so liberating to be doing something that didn’t have to impress anybody, for a change.
It was so liberating to be free of ambition, for a change.
It was so liberating to have something that belonged just to me and no one else, for a change.
It was so liberating to feel complete sovereignty, for a change. To feel complete freedom, for a change. To have something that didn’t require somebody else’s money, or somebody else’s approval, for a change.
And of course, it was then, and only then, that the outside world started paying attention.
The sovereignty you have over your work will inspire far more people than the actual content ever will. How your own sovereignty inspires other people to find their own sovereignty, their own sense of freedom and possibility, will give the work far more power than the work’s objective merits ever will.
Your idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours alone. The more the idea is yours alone, the more freedom you have to do something really amazing.
The more amazing, the more people will click with your idea. The more people click with your idea, the more this little thing of yours will snowball into a big thing.
That’s what doodling on the backs of business cards taught me.
Hugh MacLeod in Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 31
A corner of 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.
When we are children we unquestioningly see the objects around us as alive; we speak to them, give them names, breathe life into them. The imagination knows no bounds. As we grow up, we gradually lose this facility, until we finally arrive in an utterly “demystified” world that draws clear boundaries between what is alive and what is not, between subjective and objective perception. According to Sigmund Freud, culture is the only domain in our modern society that gives a measure of legitimacy to the persistence of this infantile desire to see things as animate. In the field of art, imagination is the precondition on which fiction of any sort rests; in art, mental states can be projected onto objects and images, but not in social reality or the sciences.
Dietrich Karner in Animism: Modernity Through the Looking Glass
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