Blog Archives
Q: Do you have a daily ritual that helps you start working in your studio?
Barbara’s studio
A: In the morning before I start working on a pastel painting, I read for roughly half an hour. Usually I read something art-related; for example, see the books that are quoted on Wednesdays in “Pearls from artists” on this blog.
As I’m reading, I look across at the painting on my easel and soon something becomes apparent, some annoying thing that needs immediate attention. That’s where I will begin. As I’m looking, of course, I’m thinking and the solution to a technical problem becomes obvious. Before I know it, I’m up and working, slowly improving the painting as I go.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 165
“The Space Between,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58″ x 38″
* 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 I have painted a fine picture I have not given expression to a thought! That is what they say. What fools people are! They would strip painting of all its advantages. A writer has to say almost everything in order to make himself understood, but in painting it is as if some mysterious bridge were set up between the spirit of the persons in the picture and the beholder. The beholder sees figures, the external appearance of nature, but inwardly he meditates; the true thinking that is common to all men. Some give substance to it in writing, but in so doing they lose the subtle essence. Hence, grosser minds are more easily moved by writers than by painters or musicians. The art of the painter is all the nearer to man’s heart because it seems to be more material. In painting, as in external nature, proper justice is done to what is finite and to what is infinite, in other words, to what the soul finds inwardly moving in objects that are known through the senses alone.
The Journal of Eugene Delacroix edited by Hubert Wellington
Comments are welcome!
Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: I am in the very early stages of a large pastel painting. I have never painted any of these figures before and they originated in different parts of the world. The bird (left) is from the Brooklyn Museum’s store, although it was hand carved in Guatemala. The standing figure is carved wood with beautiful painted details. It was a lucky find on a trip to Panajachel, Guatemala. The armadillo (red and grey) was made by one of my favorite Mexican folk artists (now deceased) and I believe it’s one of the last pieces he completed. It is a papier mâché figure that I found in a small shop in Mexico City. The figure on the upper right is a wooden mask bought from a talkative and talented artist at a hotel in Kandy, Sri Lanka. It depicts nagas (cobras), although you can’t tell that yet in the painting.
Comments are welcome!
Q: What one piece of artistic “equipment” could you not live without?
Untouched sandpaper
A: Undoubtedly, I could not make my work without UART sandpaper. Over the many months I spend creating a painting, I build layer upon layer of soft pastel. Because this paper is so “toothy,” it accepts all of the pastel the painting needs.
As many people know, I own and use a lot of soft pastel! My entire technique evolved around this sandpaper, which allows me to add and blend as many as thirty layers.
Comments are welcome!
Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: This one has been a problem child. Here is a large pastel painting called, “Charade, ” that still needs a lot of work.
Comments are welcome!
Q: How do you decide how much realism and how much imagination to put into a pastel painting?
Models, reference photograph, and pastel painting in progress
A: I wouldn’t say “decide” is the right word because creating a painting is not strictly the result of conscious decisions. I think of my reference photograph, my preliminary sketch, and the actual folk art objects I depict as starting points. Over the months that it takes to make a pastel painting, the resulting interpretive development pushes the painting far beyond this source material. When all goes well, the original material disappears and characters that belong to the painting and nowhere else emerge.
It is a mysterious process that I am still struggling to understand. This is the best way I can describe what it feels like from the inside, as the maker.
Comments are welcome!
Q: If you knew that you would never sell another pastel painting, would you still make them?
Preliminary sketch and photo
A: This is an interesting question to ponder in August when the art world is on vacation.
Certainly I would continue (reread my blog post of July 25th), but I wouldn’t bother to make them if one unrelated thing were true: that I knew beforehand what they would look like. Then the process just wouldn’t be very interesting.
Each pastel painting is an exploration, a journey with a point of departure. My reference photo and preliminary sketch serve as guides, but creating a painting is like making a voyage with only the roughest of maps. As I work, new possibilities open up that take the painting – and me – to places that could not have been imagined.
Comments are welcome!
Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: I continue working on “Provocateur,” a small pastel on sandpaper painting.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 155
Works in progress
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Throughout these many years of painting I have practiced starting my work from reality stating the facts before me. Then I paint without the object for a certain length of time, combining reality and imagination.
I have often obtained in painting directly from the object that which appears to be real results at the very first shot, but when that does happen, I purposely destroy what I have accomplished and re-do it over and over again. In other words that which comes easily I distrust. When I have condensed and simplified sufficiently I know that I have achieved more than reality.
Yasuo Kumiyoshi: East to West in The Creative Process, edited by Brewster Ghiselin
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 154
Idea for a painting
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Often the public forms an idea of inspiration that is quite false, almost a religious notion. Alas! I do not believe that inspiration falls from heaven. I think it rather the result of a profound indolence and of our incapacity to put to work certain forces in ourselves. These unknown forces work deep within us, with the aid of the elements of daily life, its scenes and passions, and, they burden us and oblige us to conquer the kind of somnolence in which we indulge ourselves like invalids who try to prolong dream and dread resuming contact with reality, in short when the work that makes itself in us and in spite of us demands to be born, we can believe that this work comes to us from beyond and is offered by the gods. The artist is more slumberous in order that he shall not work. By a thousand ruses, he prevents his nocturnal work from seeing the light of day.
For it is at the moment that consciousness must take a precedence and that it becomes necessary to find the means which permit the unformed work to take form, to render it visible to all. To write, to conquer ink and paper, accumulate letters and paragraphs, divide them with periods and commas, is a different matter than carrying the dream of a play or of a book.
Jean Cocteau: The Process of Inspiration in The Creative Process, edited by Brewster Ghiselin
Comments are welcome!
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