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Pearls from artists* # 105

“Blind Faith,” 38″ x 58″, soft pastel on sandpaper

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

Serendipitously, I read two memoirs in close proximity, Julia Child’s account of her life in France and how she learned to be a first-rate cook, and Renee Fleming’s story of becoming a world-class opera diva. While there were many differences between the women and the skills they set out to master, I was struck in both books by how extraordinarily hard each one worked in private for years and years before going public, certainly before becoming famous, and how each managed shame. Both women loved what they did and thus brought to bear a similar, and I suspect key, willingness to stay with their efforts through eons of study, practice, and improvement. Both had the ability to hear criticism and to make corrections repeatedly without becoming terminally discouraged; to bear the anxiety of their efforts; neither was too proud to learn and keep learning. This willingness to be taught and corrected, without feeling ashamed, sometimes over and over again, is a huge asset when you are seeking to do something very well. And one way shame impedes people is by making them take criticism too personally – as about them rather than about what they’re trying to learn.

Janna Malamud Smith in An Absorbing Errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Mastery

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Posted in 2014, An Artist's Life, Art in general, Black Paintings, Creative Process, Inspiration, Pastel Painting, Pearls from Artists, Quotes

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Pearls from artists* # 104

Aug 13

Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust

View of Roden Crater

* 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 the art historian Jack Flam has noted: ‘Art constantly reinvents itself. As time passes, new audiences find new ideas and inspiration in it and keep reframing its meanings and significance in fresh ways. Art also encourages new mental attitudes and ways of looking as it travels across space; some of these attitudes and beliefs might have been inconceivable to the people who created it, but the art nonetheless manages to speak persuasively and to create fresh images in other collective imaginations.’

Quoted in Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens by Wendy A. Grossman

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Posted in 2014, An Artist's Life, Art in general, Creative Process, Inspiration, Painting in General, Pearls from Artists, Photography, Quotes, Travel

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Pearls from artists* # 103

Aug 6

Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust

Quemado, NM

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

There are times when the art-maker’s solitude feels mildly pleasant, or deeply pleasurable, or even blissful. Many people refer to Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow” as their experience of art-making – that state of being in which one is focused and concentrated, removed from time, energized, and not lonely at all. But flow happens most readily when the task is not too frustrating, and when the obstacles feel manageable. I feel flow more readily when the writing is going well than when I’m trying to wrangle with some thorny bit of it. Then I feel unflow and, sometimes, too alone with the labor and very glad to have fond people close at hand in my life and in my memory.

Janna Malamud Smith in An Absorbing Errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Mastery

Comments are welcome!

Posted in 2014, An Artist's Life, Art in general, Creative Process, Inspiration, Pearls from Artists, Photography, Quotes, Travel, Working methods

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Q: What is the reality of the art world today? Do people experience it enough?

Aug 2

Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust

West 29th Street studio

A: I cannot comment on the art world today or the experience of other people. I can only speak for myself. I am completely devoted to my work; my entire life revolves around art. When I’m not in my studio creating, I am reading about art, thinking about it, gaining inspiration from other artists and from artistic travel, working out new ideas, going to museum and gallery exhibitions, trying to understand the business side of things, etc. Art is a calling and I personally experience it enough as my work continues to evolve!

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Posted in 2014, An Artist's Life, Art in general, Black Paintings, Creative Process, Inspiration, New York, NY, Pastel Painting, Photography, Studio, Working methods

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Pearls from artists* # 102

Jul 30

Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust

New York, NY

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

That a photograph is unlikely to be a laboratory record is evident when we think about how it is made. Most photographers are people of immense enthusiasms whose work involves many choices – to brake the car, grab the yellow instead of the green filter, wait out the cloud, and at the second everything looks inexplicably right, to release the shutter. Behind these decisions stands the photographer’s individual framework of recollections and meditations about the way he perceived that place or places like it before. Without such a background there would be no knowing whether the scene on the ground glass was characteristic of the geography and of his experience of it and intuition of it – in short, whether it was true.

Making photographs has to be, then, a personal matter; when it is not, the results are not persuasive. Only the artist’s presence in the work can convince us that its affirmation resulted from and has been tested by human experience. Without the photographer in the photograph the view is no more compelling than the product of some annoying record camera, a machine perhaps capable of happy accident but not response to form.

Beauty in Photography by Robert Adams

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Posted in 2014, An Artist's Life, Art in general, Creative Process, Inspiration, New York, NY, Pearls from Artists, Photography, Quotes, Working methods

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Pearls from artists* # 100

Jul 16

Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust

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.

I think it’s terribly important that people have always made structures that are better and more rigorous and more demanding than we as an audience can live up to for every single moment. Serious art should be better than you are. I think my plays are more lucid, more rigorous, than I, Richard, am in my life. I’m a stumble bum like all the rest of us. Create art that is better than you are able to manifest in normal life.

Richard Foreman in Anne Bogart’s Conversations with Anne: Twenty-four Interviews

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Posted in 2014, An Artist's Life, Art in general, Black Paintings, Creative Process, Gods and Monsters, Inspiration, New York, NY, Pastel Painting, Pearls from Artists, Photography, Quotes, Studio, Working methods

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Pearls from artists* # 99

Jul 9

Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust

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.

I think there are two very interesting stages in creative work. One is confusion and one is boredom. They generally both mean that there’s a big fish swimming under the water. As Rilke said, “Live the questions.” And not judge that there’s something wrong about confusion, because the people who are working, say, on the cure for leprosy – they work for years and years in a state of confusion, and very often they don’t find the cure. They find something completely different. But they keep living the question. Confusion is absolutely essential to the creative process. If there was no confusion, why do it? I always feel that all of us have questions we’re asking all our lives, for our work, and if we ever found the answer, we’d stop working. We wouldn’t need to work anymore.

Boredom – if you’ve ever been in therapy, you’d know that when you start getting bored, that’s really important. The therapist sits up; there’s something going on, because the wall that you come against – that’s where the real gold is. It’s really precious.

Andre Gregory (from My Dinner with Andre) in Anne Bogart, Conversations with Anne: Twenty-four Interviews

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Posted in 2014, An Artist's Life, Art in general, Art Works in Progress, Black Paintings, Creative Process, Inspiration, New York, NY, Pastel Painting, Pearls from Artists, Photography, Quotes, Studio, Working methods

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Q: Would you speak about your first trip to Mexico?

Jun 21

Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust

With an amate tree at Chalcatzingo

A: In the early 90’s my late husband, Bryan, and I made our first trip to Oaxaca and to Mexico City. At the time I had become fascinated with the Mexican “Day of the Dead” celebrations so our trip was timed to see them firsthand. Along with busloads of other tourists, we visited several cemeteries in small Oaxacan towns. The indigenous people tending their ancestor’s graves were so dignified and so gracious, even with so many mostly-American tourists tromping around on a sacred night, that I couldn’t help being taken with these beautiful people and their beliefs. From Oaxaca we traveled to Mexico City, where again I was entranced, but this time by the rich and ancient history. On that first trip to Mexico we visited the National Museum of Anthropology, where I was introduced to the fascinating story of ancient Mesoamerican civilizations (it is still one of my favorite museums in the world); the ancient city of Teotihuacan, which the Aztecs discovered as an abandoned city and then occupied as their own; and the Templo Mayor, the historic center of the Aztec empire, infamous as a place of human sacrifice. I was astounded! Why had I never learned in school about Mexico, this highly developed cradle of Western civilization in our own hemisphere, when so much time had been devoted to the cultures of Egypt, Greece, and elsewhere? When I returned home to Virginia I began reading everything I could find about ancient Mexican civilizations, including the Olmec, Zapotec, Mixtec, Aztec, and Maya. This first trip to Mexico opened up a whole new world and was to profoundly influence my future work. I would return there many more times, most recently this past March to study Olmec art and culture.

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Posted in 2014, An Artist's Life, Art in general, Creative Process, Inspiration, Mexico, Photography, Travel

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Pearls from artists* # 95

Jun 11

Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust

Negombo, Sri Lanka

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

Not enough people believe in the cracks in the universe that you have to wiggle into to get anything new established. There are cracks – places that are not filled in that need to be filled in, so the edifice doesn’t crumble. And if you believe in the arts passionately, they fit into those cracks, because without those connective tissues of understanding all we are are people who go to war every so often.

Zelda Fichandler in Conversations with Anne: Twenty-four Interviews

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Posted in 2014, An Artist's Life, Art in general, Creative Process, Inspiration, Pearls from Artists, Photography, Quotes, Sri Lanka, Travel

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Pearls from artists* # 89

Apr 30

Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust

Some of Barbara’s pastels

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

Dear Diary:

On a drifty Manhattan stroll
The kind that unearths magical treasures
I made a right turn off of Houston
Onto Bowery
And as it became Third Avenue
I came upon this old art store
That creaked hello
Its warped wooden shelves
Held new paints
A little dusty from the old building
But whose colors were deeper
Than I’d ever seen before

And at the back of the store
Up a narrow stairway
Was a tiny room
And behind a long table stood three people
(Probably artists)
Who could get me any paper I desired
Paper with designs
To collage with
Hot press, cold press
100 gram, 600 gram paper
To draw and paint on
Any kind of paper I’d ever want
Templates from heaven

And over my right shoulder
Was a tall window
Overlooking the glorious city
That has held this little room
Tenderly in its arms
All these years

And as I hugged
My rolled up package of paper
And went back downstairs
The old stairs seemed to gently whisper
“Come back soon,
We’ll keep each other alive”

And stepping outside
Third Avenue seemed more spacious
And I took a deep breath
As the world
Kaleidoscoped
With possibilities
Lovingly wrapped up
By three kind artists
At the top of the world.

“Art Supplies From Heaven,“ by Judith Ellen Sanders, published in “Metropolitan Diary,” NY Times, April 6, 2014

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Posted in 2014, An Artist's Life, Art in general, Creative Process, Inspiration, New York, NY, Painting in General, Pastel Painting, Pearls from Artists, Photography, Quotes, Studio, Working methods

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Blog Archives

Pearls from artists* # 105

Pearls from artists* # 104

Pearls from artists* # 103

Q: What is the reality of the art world today? Do people experience it enough?

Pearls from artists* # 100

Pearls from artists* # 99

Q: Would you speak about your first trip to Mexico?

Pearls from artists* # 95

Pearls from artists* # 89

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