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Q: With so many soft pastels to choose from, do you have a way of organizing them so that you can find the color you need?
Barbara’s Studio
A: The arrangement of my pastels evolved organically. I keep them in their original trays. My oldest pastel sets are closer to the easel and the newest ones are the furthest away. After 37 years of experience working in pastel, I am well-acquainted with their individual properties. I know exactly where to find each color based on which manufacturer makes it.
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Pearls from artists* # 194
“Epiphany,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″
* 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 did sculpture because what interested me in painting was to bring some order to my brain. It was a change of means. I took to clay as a break from painting; at the time I’d done absolutely everything I could in painting. Which means it was still about organizing. It was to put my sensations in order and look for a method that really suited me. When I’d found it in sculpture, I used it for painting. To come into possession of my own brain: that was always the goal, a sort of hierarchy of all my sensations, so that I could reach a conclusion.
One day, visiting Carriere at his house, I told him that. He replied: “But, my friend, that’s why you work. If you ever managed it, you’d probably stop working. It’s your reason for working.”
In painting – in any oeuvre – the goal is to reconcile the irreconcilable. There are all kinds of qualities in us, contradictory qualities. You have to construct something viable with that, something stable. That’s why you work your whole life long and want to keep on working until the last moment… as long as you haven’t admitted defeat or lost your curiosity, as long as you haven’t settled into a routine.
Chatting with Henri Matisse: The Lost 1941 Interview, Henri Matisse with Pierre Courthion, edited by Serge Guilbaut, translated by Chris Miller
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Pearls from artists* # 149
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.
Real collecting begins in lust: I have to have this, live with this, learn from this, figure out how to pay for this. It cannot be about investment or status. Like making art, writing about it or organizing its public display (in galleries or in museums), collecting is a form of personal expression. It is, in other words, a way to know yourself, and to participate in and contribute to creativity, which is essential to human life on earth.
Roberta Smith in Collecting for Pleasure, Not Status, The New York Times, May 15, 2015
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