Blog Archives
Q: Please introduce yourself and tell us what makes your work unique. (Question from Bold Journey)
With a Giacometti at Fondation Maeght, St. Paul de Vence, France; Photo: Christine Marchal
A: I am a contemporary painter based in New York City, best known for large pastel-on-sandpaper paintings inspired by Bolivian Carnival masks and Latin American folk art. For more than 40 years, I have been committed to elevating pastel as a fine art medium.
My blog, Barbara Rachko’s Colored Dust, has 229,000 subscribers, and I’m the subject of the documentary Barbara Rachko: True Grit, available on YouTube. My e-book, From Pilot to Painter, tells my story of moving from Navy Commander, commercial pilot, and Boeing-727 Flight Engineer to professional artist.
My work has been developed into three major series—Domestic Threats, Black Paintings, and Bolivianos. In 2023, I was featured in a documentary that premiered at the Newport Beach Film Festival, winning both the Audience Award and Best in Category.
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Pearls from artists* # 630
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
During the Victorian age, women, with their ‘smaller,’ less ‘creative’ brains, were considered incapable of becoming professional artists and were often restricted to ‘craft’ or ‘design’ (genres not considered ‘fine art’ by the establishment). This perception made it very difficult not only for women to be taken seriously as artists, but for their (and their female predecessors’) work to be sold. In order to get around this, nineteenth-century art dealers were known to scratch out a female artist’s signature and replace it with that of a male contemporary, which explains why many works by women have only just come to light. (No wonder so many of them hid self-portraits among their still lifes).
Katy Hessel in The Story of Art Without Men
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Q: Many artists can’t bear to face a blank canvas. How do you feel about starting a new piece?
Starting a 26” x 20”pastel painting!
A: That’s an interesting question because I happen to be re-reading The War of Art by Steven Pressfield and this morning I saw this:
You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study. He applied to the Academy of Fine Arts and later to the school of architecture. Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I’ll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.
I’ve never understood this fear of “the blank canvas” because I am always excited about beginning a new painting. When you think about it, artists can often say, “In the history of the planet no one has ever made what I am about to make!” Once again I am looking at something new on my easel, even if it is only a blank 26” x 20” piece of sandpaper clipped to a slightly larger piece of foam core.
Unlike artists who are paralyzed before “a blank canvas,” I am energized by the imagined possibilities of all that empty space! I spend three or four months on a pastel painting so this experience of looking at a blank piece of paper on my easel happens three or four times a year at most.
Excluding travel to remote places, which is essential to my work and endlessly fascinating, the first day I get to spend blocking in a new painting is the most exhilarating part of my whole creative process. It’s when I feel the freest! I select the pastel colors quickly, without thinking too much about them, first imagining them, then feeling, looking, and reacting intuitively, always correcting and trying to make the painting look better and better!
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Q: You seem very disciplined. Do you ever have a day when you just can’t get excited about going to the studio to work?
Signing “Narcissist”
A: That happens occasionally, but I usually still go to the studio to work. You know the expression, “99% of life is just showing up”? Well, of course I have to show up at my studio to accomplish anything so I still try to keep fairly regular studio hours – 6 to 7 hours a day, 4 or 5 days a week. And that’s not to mention all the other work – answering email, checking social media, writing blog posts, etc. – which I tend to do at lunchtime, in the evenings, and on my days off from the studio.
When you are an artist there is always work to do and for some of it, no one else can do it because no one else knows the work from the inside the way the maker does. I like what Twyla Tharp says in her book, “The Creative Habit.” In order to progress an artist needs good work habits that become a daily routine. And Chuck Close used to say, “Inspiration is for amateurs,” meaning a professional works whether she’s in the mood or not. I completely agree so I keep working and slowly moving ahead.
As Tchaikovsky wrote in a letter to a friend:
We must always work, and a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood. If we wait for the mood, without endeavoring to meet it halfway, we easily become indolent and apathetic. We must be patient, and believe that inspiration will come to those who can master their disinclination. A few days ago I told you I was working every day without any real inspiration. Had I given way to my disinclination, undoubtedly I should have drifted into a long period of idleness. But my patience and faith did not fail me, and today I felt that inexplicable glow of inspiration of which I told you; thanks to which I know beforehand that whatever I write today will have power to make an impression, and to touch the hearts of those who hear it.
Quoted in Eric Maisel’s A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and Performing Artists.
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Q: Would you share a bit more about yourself? (Question from “Bold Journey”)
A: I am an American contemporary Master Pastel Artist 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 my popular blog, “Barbara Rachko’s Colored Dust,” which currently has more than 125,000 subscribers. I am proud to be represented by Apricus Art Collection (US), Art Client Services (US), Galleria Balmain (UK), Emillions (US), Interstellar (IN), and Galleri SoHo (SE). I am a member of the International Association of Visual artists.
I travel regularly to Mexico, Central America, South America, and Asia. Since 2017 I have been creating “Bolivianos,” a painting series based on an exhibition of Carnival masks I photographed at the Museum of Ethnography and Folklore in La Paz.
My life has been called “extraordinary and inspiring.” I learned to fly when I was 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 Jack was killed onboard the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. Ever since that awful day, I have worked hard to overcome my husband’s tragic loss. Now I enjoy a thriving career as an internationally-known professional artist.
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Q: How do you persist despite the haters, nay-sayers, etc.? (Question from Bold Journey Publishing)
Barbara’s Studio
A: There are so many obstacles to art-making and countless reasons to just give up. When you really think about it, it’s amazing that great art gets made at all. So why do we do it? For artists I believe it’s all about making our time on earth matter, about devotion to our innate gifts, and a deep love of our hard-fought creative process.
I have been a full-time professional artist for 37 years. How and why do successful artists persist? It helps a lot to be stubborn! We just keep digging in that much deeper. Making art is a most noble and sacred calling – you know this if you are one of the called – and that’s what separates those of us who are in it for the long haul from the wimps, fakers, and hangers-on. I say to my fellow artists who continue to work despite the endless challenges, we artists who continue to struggle every day for recognition of our gifts are true heroes!
These words below by Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women, published in 2017, ring true for artists. It’s good, even for me, to occasionally reread them and be reminded.
The obstacles faced by women who hoped to leave a mark on humankind have, through the millennium, varied in height but not in stubborn persistence. And yet, a great many women have stubbornly ignored them. The desire to put words on a page or marks on a canvas was greater than the accrued social forces that told them they had no right to do so, that they were excluded by their gender from that priestly class called artist. The reason, according to Western tradition, was as old as creation itself: For many, God was the original artist and society had assigned its creator a gender – He. The woman who dared to declare herself an artist in defiance of centuries of such unwavering belief required monstrous strength, to fight not for equal recognition and reward but for something at once more basic and vital: her very life. Her art was her life. Without it, she was nothing. Having no faith that society would broaden its views on artists by dethroning men and accommodating women, in 1928 [Virginia] Woolf offered her fellow writers and painters a formula for survival that allowed them to create, if not with acceptance, then at least unimpeded. A woman artist, she said, needed but two possessions: “money and a room of her own.”
Furthermore, I think I persist because I do not believe in “big breaks.” Big breaks may sometimes happen, but in my experience an artist’s life is made up of single-minded dedication, persistence, hard work, and lots of small breaks. I recently finished reading “Failing Up: How to Take Risks, Aim Higher, and Never stop Learning” by Leslie Odom, Jr. I like what he has to say to artists here:
The biggest break is the one you give yourself by choosing to believe in your wisdom, in what you love, and in the gifts you have to offer the waiting world.
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Pearls from artists* # 591
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Like lîla, or divine creativity, art is a gift, coming from a place of joy, self-discovery, inner knowing. Play, intrinsically rewarding, doesn’t cost anything. As soon as you put a price on it, it becomes, to some extent, not play. Somewhere, therefore, we each have to map out for ourselves the tricky questions of money and the artist. This is a difficult issue because artists have to eat, equip themselves, and subsidize years of professional training. Yet the marketplace shifts our art at least to some degree out of the state of free play, and may in some cases contaminate it totally. Professional athletes face the same issues. Certainly they play to a great extent for love of their sport, but issues of money, prestige, and fame introduce a lot of non play as well.
Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art
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Q: What do you like most about being an artist?
Entrance to Barbara’s studio
A: I love walking into my studio in the morning, knowing that I will spend the day doing what I love, using all my talents, skills, and experience to solve whatever problems lie ahead in the work. As artists we create our own tasks and then go about solving them. Yes, the day to day challenges are significant, but having the freedom to do meaningful work that we love is priceless.
When I was a Lieutenant in the Navy working at the Pentagon, I was very unhappy (and one doesn’t just give two weeks notice and leave the Navy behind)! I still remember what it was like having a soul-crushing job. I am grateful for this turn in my life journey. How much better life is as a professional artist!
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 548
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
We who work in the arts are at risk of being in a popularity contest rather than a profession. If that fact causes you despair, you should probably pick another profession. Your desire to communicate must be bigger than your relationship to these chaotic and unfair realities. Ideally, we must be even more ‘professional’ than lawyers, doctors, accountants, hairdressers. We have to create our own standards of discipline.
All of the successful artists I know are very disciplined and very organized. Even if they don’t look organized, they have their own order.
Anna Deavere Smith in Letters to a Young Artist: Straight Up Advice on Making a Life in the Arts – for Actors, Performers, Writers, and Artists of Every Kind
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Pearls from artists* # 528
*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 so many good reasons to stop complaining if you want to live a more creative life.
First of all, it’s annoying. Every artist complains, so it’s a dead and boring topic. (From the volume of complaints that emerges from the professional creative class, you would think these people had been sentenced to their vocations by an evil dictator, rather than having chosen their line of work with a free will and open heart).
Second, of course it’s difficult to create things; if it wasn’t difficult, everyone would be doing it, and it wouldn’t be special or interesting.
Third, nobody ever really listens to anybody else’s complaints, anyhow, because we’re all too focused on our own holy struggle, so basically, you’re just talking to a brick wall.
Fourth, and most important, you’re scaring away inspiration. Every time you express a complaint about how difficult and tiresome it is to be creative, inspiration takes another step away from you, offended. It’s almost like inspiration puts up its hands and says, “Hey, sorry buddy! I didn’t realize my presence was such a drag. I’ll take my business elsewhere.”
Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic: Creative living Beyond Fear
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