Blog Archives
Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: I am working on a small pastel painting, a portrait of my favorite Mexican Judas figure.
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Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in pogress
A: I am working on a 38″ x 58″ pastel painting. Rather than create and photograph a new setup each time, I sometimes search through older photographs to find ones that might spark a compelling painting. Photos that I haven’t seen in a while often have new lessons to teach. The one clipped to my easel above is from 2009.
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Q: How do you document your work?
Barbara’s portfolio book
A: I have been a professional artist for thirty years so some things have changed and some haven’t. I have a portfolio book of 8 x 10 photographs of all my pastel paintings. Since my process is slow and meticulous, the latest, “Troublemaker,” is pastel painting number 124.
I have always gotten my work professionally photographed. Until 2001 my husband Bryan was my photographer and since then I have hired three people. To document older work I have slides, 4 x 5 transparencies, and color and black and white 4 x 5 negatives. I continued with slides and film longer than many artists, but finally switched to digital files a few years ago when buying film and processing it became difficult.
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Q: Would you talk about your use of Mexican and Guatemalan folk art as a convenient way to study formal properties such as color, shape, pattern, composition, etc. in your pastel paintings?
Models, reference photograph, and pastel painting in progress
A: For me an interesting visual property of these objects is that they readily present themselves as a vehicle for exploring formal artistic properties, like color, pattern, shape, etc. especially compared to my earlier subject matter: hyper-realistic portraits and still-lifes. Intent as I was on creating verisimilitude in the earlier work, there was little room for experimentation.
Many Mexican and Guatemalan folk art objects are wildly painted and being a lover of color, their brilliant colors and patterns are what initially attracted me. As a painter I am free to use their actual appearance as my starting point. I photograph them out-of-focus and through colored gels in order to change their appearance and make them strange, enacting my own particular version of “rendering the familiar strange.” Admittedly these objects are not so familiar to begin with.
When I make a pastel painting I look at my reference photograph and I also look at the objects, positioning them within eye-shot of my easel. There is no need whatsoever to be faithful to their actual appearance so my imagination takes over. As I experiment with thousands of soft pastels, with shape, with pattern, with composition, and all the rest, I have one goal in mind – to create the best pastel-on-sandpaper painting I am capable of making.
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Pearls from artists # 146
“The Sovereign,” 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.
I try to remember that painting at its best is a form of communication, that it is constantly reaching out to find response from an ideal and sympathetic audience. This I know is not accomplished by pictorial rhetoric nor by the manipulation of seductive paint surfaces. Nor is a good picture concocted out of theatrical props, beautiful subjects, or memories of other paintings. All these might astound but they will never communicate the emotional content or exaltation of life, which I believe an artist, by definition, has to accept as his task.
Julian Levi: Before Paris and After in The Creative Process, edited by Brewster Ghiselin
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Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: I am close to finishing a 38″ x 58″ pastel painting called “Duality.”
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Pearls from artists* # 141
Painting, subject, reference photo
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
It would be very interesting to record photographically not the stages of a painting, but its metamorphoses. One would see perhaps by what course a mind finds its way towards the crystallization of its dream. But what is really very curious is to see that the picture does not change basically, that the initial vision remains almost intact in spite of appearances. I see often a light and dark, when I have put them in my picture, I do everything I can to ‘break them up,’ in adding a color that creates a counter effect. I perceive, when this work is photographed, that which I have introduced to correct my first vision has disappeared, and that after all the photographic image corresponds to my first vision, before the occurrence of the transformation brought about by my will.
The picture is not thought out and determined beforehand, rather while it is being made it follows the mobility of thought. Finished, it changes further, according to the condition of him who looks at it. A picture lives its life like a living creature, undergoing the changes that daily life imposes on us. That is natural, since a picture lives only through him who looks at it.
Christian Zervos: Conversation with Picasso in The Creative Process, edited by Brewster Ghiselin
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Q: What’s on the easel today?
“Duality,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″
A: I continue working on a large pastel painting called, “Duality.” This one is taking longer than usual, perhaps because the large heads are a departure from anything I’ve made before. I am having to find my way more slowly.
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Pearls from artists* # 139
“Broken,” 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.
Leaving a show of Pat Steir’s work called Winter Paintings at Cheim & Read Gallery, I thought back some years to when the Walker Art Center’s then curator Richard Flood was walking us through the Center’s collection and we came upon an abstract expressionist painting by Joan Mitchell that was so striking I asked him why it had taken so long for her to be recognized. He answered with a wry expression: “It’s the problem of beauty!”
A few days earlier our friends Kol and Dash came to lunch at our home, and Dash said at this time most visual art is conceptual. “It’s a way of thinking,” she said.
Story/Time: The Life of an Idea/Bill T. Jones
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Q: What do you do when you are between paintings?
Work in progress
A: I would be at loose ends if I finished a pastel painting and didn’t have another one immediately available to work on. It’s one reason I always have two paintings in progress. Another is that when I get stuck on some technical problem, I can switch to the other painting. Works in progress tend to interact and play off of each other. As I am working on a second painting, solutions to problems I had on the first quickly become apparent.
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