Blog Archives
Q: What makes you drawn to face masks?
A: For me a mask is so much more than a mask. It is almost a living thing with its own soul and with a unique history. I always wonder, who created this mask? For what purpose? Where has it been? What stories would it tell if it could? In my current “Bolivianos” series I feel as though I am creating portraits of living, or perhaps once living, beings.
In a way the masks are a pretext for a return to my early days as an artist. When I resigned my Naval commission to pursue art full time, I started out as a photo-realist portrait painter. The twist is that this time I do not have to satisfy a client’s request to make my subjects look younger or more handsome. I am joyfully free to respond only to the needs of the pastel painting before me on the easel.
Comments are welcome!
Q: Why do you make a preliminary drawing before you begin a pastel painting?
A: I make a preliminary charcoal drawing because that’s how I like to begin thinking about and planning a new pastel painting. I always make preliminary drawings the same size as the upcoming pastel painting. While I draw, I make decisions about the overall composition, decide where the major light and dark shapes will be, and envision the likely problem areas that lie ahead. These drawings are done quickly. I spend perhaps an hour on them.
Once the drawing is in my head I no longer need it. So I put it away and when it’s time to begin a subsequent pastel painting, I erase it. I wipe it out with a paper towel and make the next preliminary charcoal drawing directly on top. These are ephemeral tools, existing only for as long as I need them.
Comments are welcome!
Q: Who are you and what do you do? (Question from “Arts Illustrated”)
A: Here is my professional bio.
I am an American contemporary artist and author who divides my time between residences in New York City and Alexandria, VA. I am best known for my pastel-on-sandpaper paintings, my eBook, “From Pilot to Painter,” and this blog, which now has over 70,000 subscribers!
Friends say that I have led an extraordinary, inspiring life. I learned to fly at the age of 25 and became a commercial pilot and Boeing-727 flight engineer before joining the Navy. As a Naval officer I spent many years working at the Pentagon and retired as a Commander.
On 9/11 my husband, Dr. Bryan C. Jack, was tragically killed on the plane that hit the Pentagon.
I use my large collection of Mexican and Guatemalan folk art – masks, carved wooden animals, papier mâché figures, and toys – to create one-of-a-kind pastel-on-sandpaper paintings that combine reality and fantasy and depict personal narratives. In 2017 I traveled to Bolivia where I became inspired to paint Bolivian Carnival masks.
My pastel paintings are bold, vibrant, and extremely unusual. Perhaps my business card says it all: “Revolutionizing Pastel as Fine Art!”
I exhibit nationally and internationally and have won many accolades during my 30+ years as a professional artist. For additional info, please see the links in the sidebar.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 430
Barbara at work on “Schemer,” Soft Pastel on Sandpaper, 26” x 20”
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
In art there must be a governing thought expressed eloquently. We must have it in ourselves, and stamp upon others, just as a medal is stamped… Art is not a pleasure trip; it is a battle, a mill that grinds. I’m not a philosopher. I don’t want to stop pain, or find a formula that makes me indifferent or stoic. Pain is, perhaps, that which makes the artist express himself most distinctly.
Jean Francois Millet quoted by Mariella Guzzoni in Vincent’s Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him
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Pearls from artists* # 213
Matisse Book Cover
* 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 am astonished by the accuracy with which Matisse remembers the most trifling facts; he describes a room that he went into forty years ago and gives you the measurements, where every piece of furniture stood, how the light fell. He is a man of astounding precision and has little time for anything that he has not confirmed for himself. In art matters, he is not the sort to go looking for a profile fortuitously created by cracks in the wall. Elie Faure writes that Matisse is perhaps the only one of his contemporaries (in particular Marquet and Bonnard) to know exactly where he comes from and the only one who never allows it to show “because his inveterate, invincible, vigilant willpower is always focused on being himself and nothing but.”
Matisse neglects nothing. He seems to know as much about the art market as about painting.
So many stratagems to sell a painting, from intimidating the purchaser to seeming to avoid him: Vollard used them all and used them successfully. Not least the lies that he told to reassure the client. “It works like this,” says Matisse: “To make a sale, you invent lies that have somehow disappeared into thin air by the time the deal is done.”
We talk of the difficulties faced by dealers hoping to gain access to Renoir in his Cagnes residence. Renoir didn’t like having people talk to him about selling his work,” says Matisse: “It bored him. About the only one who got a foot in the door was Paul Guillaume; he dressed up as a young worker with a floppy necktie: “You see, I’m a local. I’ve always loved your painting. I’ve just inherited a little money; I’d like to buy something.”
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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Q: As an artist what would you say is your particular ‘superpower’?
Barbara’s studio
A: I have been told that it is my unique way of composing images or, in other words, how I deliberately move the viewer’s eye around the picture. More exactly, it’s the way I combine flat shapes, patterns, angles, forms, modeling, decoration, details, lights, and darks in surprising ways when I make pastel paintings or pick up a camera.
But I think there’s a secondary, more subtle element: my understanding of and sensitivity to using color for psychological effect. The way I use color in pastel paintings is intuitive. This is something I haven’t reflected on very much yet, but will examine in a future post.
Comments are welcome!
Q: How do you think living in New York affects your work?
Lower Manhattan
A: Arguably, life in New York provides an artist with direct access to some of the best international art of the past, the present, and probably the future. It is possible to see more art here – both good and bad – than in any other American city.
Just pick up any local magazine and scan the art listings! Our problem is never that there isn’t anything interesting to see or do. It’s “how do we zero in on the most significant local cultural activities, ones that might contribute to making us better artists?”
Certainly a visual artist’s work is consciously and unconsciously influenced not only by what she sees in museums and galleries, but by walking around the city. That’s partly why I am an inveterate walker. I never know what amazing things I am going to see when I leave my apartment.
Although living in New York City is a rich and heady mix for anyone, it is more so for sensitive artists. Artists are virtual sponges, soaking up experiences, processing them, and mysteriously expressing them in our work.
New York lets an artist ponder excellence as we see and experience firsthand what is possible. The best of the best manages to make its way here.
Undoubtedly, my own work is richer for having spent the last eighteen years in this fascinating, wild, and crazy city. For a visual artist New York is an infinitely fascinating place to live.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 153
“So What?”, 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.
Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little. I have lived enough around painters and around studios to have had all the theories – and how contradictory they are – rammed down my throat. A man has to have a gizzard like an ostrich to digest all the brass tacks and wire nails of modern art theories. Perhaps all the theories, the utterly indigestible theories, like nails in an ostrich’s gizzard, do indeed help to grind small and make digestible all the emotional and aesthetic pabulum that lies in an artist’s soul. But they can serve no other purpose. Not even corrective. The modern theories of art make real pictures impossible. You only get these expositions, critical ventures in paint, and fantastic negations. And the bit of fantasy that may lie in the negation – as in a Dufy or a de Chirico – is just the bit that has escaped theory and perhaps saves the picture. Theorise, theorise all you like – but when you start to paint, shut your theoretic eyes and go for it with instinct and intuition.
D.H. Lawrence: Making Pictures in The Creative Process, edited by Brewster Ghiselin
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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?
Work in progress
A: I am in the early stages – only 3 or 4 layers of pastel applied so far – on a large pastel painting with the working title, “He and She.” The figures are two favorites – a four-foot tall male and female couple, made of carved wood and silver and gold-leaf. I found them years ago at Galerie Eugenio in Mexico City.
These are the largest heads I have ever painted. As I work on this piece I remember one of my teachers saying, “Never paint a head larger than life-size.” Well, here’s to breaking rules.
For reference I am looking at a digital photograph shot with my Canon T3i. My usual practice is to make a c-print from a negative made with my Mamiya 6, but the photo clipped to my easel above is from a high resolution JPEG. Typically I set up a scene at home on a black cloth and photograph it, but my reference photo was taken in my studio without rearranging anything. In this painting I am breaking a few rules, while my creative process is perhaps evolving towards greater simplicity.
Comments are welcome!
