Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 491
*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 look at ancient Egyptian painting today and may find it slightly comic, but what the Egyptians were trying to do with the figure was reveal the various aspects of the person’s body in the most characteristic aspect. The face is in profile because that reveals the most about the person’s face, but the shoulders are not in profile, they’re facing the viewer, because that’s the most revealing angle for the shoulders. The hips are not in profile, but the feet are. It gives a strange, twisted effect, but it was natural to the Egyptians. They were painting essences, and in order to paint an essence you have to paint it from its most characteristic angle. So they would simply combine the various characteristic essences of the human body. This was a piece of spiritual art. It wasn’t trying to reproduce photographic reality, it was trying to reproduce and combine all the essential features of a person within one figure.
Walter Murch in The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 463
*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 in doubt, when you are lost, don’t stop. Instead, concentrate on detail. Look around, find a detail to concentrate on and do that. Forget the big picture for a while. Just put your energy into the details of what is already there. The big picture will eventually open up and reveal itself if you can stay out of the way for a while. It won’t open up if you stop. You have to stay involved but you don’t always have to stay involved with the big picture.
While paying attention to the details and welcoming insecurity, while walking the tightrope between control and chaos and using accidents, while allowing yourself to go off balance and going through the back door, while creating the circumstances in which something might happen and being ready for the leap, while not hiding and being ready to stop doing homework, something is bound to happen. And it will probably be appropriately embarrassing.
Anne Bogart in A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theatre
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 348
“The Orator” in “Worlds Seen & Unseen” at Westbeth Gallery, NYC
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
The percipient apprehends the primal quality of art as beauty and symbol, in an experience that invariably involves a sense of radical mystery. Art dissolves the fog of Consensus in which we normally operate to reveal the unseen in the situation. It places us in exactly the same position as the first people who stared up at the stars in wonder. The work of art is perpetually new; it demands reinterpretation with each era, each generation, each percipient. Great works of art are like inexhaustible springs originating from a place beyond our “little world of man.” They reconnect us with a reality too vast for the rational mind to comprehend. Therefore, art can be described as the human activity through which our all-too-human mentality is overcome and in light of which all finite judgments are shown to be inefficient. It is at once a sinking to the source and a leap toward the infinite.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 174
Barbara’s studio, Photo: Marianne Barcellona
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
If you are older, trust that the world has been educating you all along. You already know so much more than you think you know. You are not finished; you are merely ready. After a certain age, no matter how you’ve been spending your time, you have very likely earned a doctorate in living. If you’re still here – if you have survived this long – it is because you know things. We need you to reveal to us what you know, what you have learned, what you have seen and felt. If you are older, chances are strong that you may already possess absolutely everything you need to possess in order to live a more creative life – except the confidence to actually do your work. But we need you to do your work.
Whether you are young or old, we need your work in order to enrich and inform our own lives.
Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 169
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.
For many, the familiar presence of things is a comfort. Things are valued not only because of their rarity or cost or their historical aura, but because they seem to partake in our lives; they are domesticated, part of our routine and so of us. Their long association with us seems to make them custodians of our memories; so that sometimes, as in Proust, things reveal us to ourselves in profound and unexpected ways.
The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects by Peter Schwenger
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 161
Whitney Museum
* 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 is the artist’s innate sensitivity that makes him special and different from other professionals. Society expects the artist to be more compassionate and understanding in order to bring out that which will enlighten, inspire and encourage life in his work. His vocation should not just be for art’s sake.
Where the average person sees an old beat-up shark, the artist sees a symbol of beauty in aging and imagines bringing out those qualities that the shark has sheltered over the ages, by means of artistic creation. To the intelligent and sensitive artist, the homeless man lying on the street corner is a symbol that reminds us of what we, as a society, should be doing to better our living.
Sensitivity comes into play when leaves that appear to the general viewer to be uniformly green are seen by the sensitive artist to be different shades, tones, and subtle nuances of green. Without sensitivity, special and important characteristics of nature will be out of our sight and out of reach to the viewing layman. Only the obvious, the average and the common will reveal themselves to the insensitive artist. The endurance of certain works will depend on what the artist has captured with the help of his sensitivity and because of the ideas behind the work.
Samuel Adoquei in Origin of Inspiration: Seven Short Essays for Creative People
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 158
“Dichotomy,” 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.
It is the artist’s innate sensitivity that makes him special and different from other professionals. Society expects the artist to be more compassionate and understanding in order to bring out that which will enlighten, inspire and encourage life in his work. His vocation should not just be art for art’s sake.
Where the average person sees an old beat-up shark, the artist sees a symbol of beauty in aging and imagines bringing out those qualities that the shark has sheltered over the ages by means of artistic creation. To the intelligent and sensitive artist, the homeless man lying on the street corner is a symbol that reminds us of what we, as a society, should do to better our living.
Sensitivity comes into play when leaves that appear to the general viewer to be uniformly green are seen by the sensitive artist to be different shades, tones and nuances of green. Without sensitivity, special and important characteristics of nature will be out of sight and out of reach to the viewing layman. Only the obvious, the average and the common will reveal themselves to the insensitive artist. The endurance of certain works will depend on what the artist has captured with the help of his sensitivity and because of the ideas behind the work.
Samuel Adoquei in Origin of Inspiration: Seven Short Essays for Creative People
Comments are welcome!
Q: I’m convinced that some information and ideas are hidden, or even encrypted in the environment we live in, so we need a way to decipher them. Maybe one of the roles of an artist is to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature. What’s your opinion about this?
Barbara’s studio
A: I agree. Artists in general are more sensitive to these sorts of hidden ideas, feelings, emotions, etc. in ways that most non-artists are not. It’s a cliche but it’s true.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 107
“The Ancestors,” 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.
If the proper goal of art is, as I now believe, Beauty, the Beauty that concerns me is that of Form. Beauty is, in my view, a synonym of the coherence and structure underlying life (not for nothing does Aristotle list plot first in his enumeration of the components of tragedy, a genre of literature that, at least in its classical form, affirms order in life). Beauty is the overriding demonstration of pattern that one observes, for example, in the plays of Sophocles and Shakespeare, the fiction of Joyce, the films of Ozu, the paintings of Cezanne and Matisse and Hopper, and the photographs of Timothy O’Sullivan, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Dorothea Lange.
Why is Form beautiful? Because, I think, it helps us meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life may be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning. James Dickey was right when he asked rhetorically, “What is heaven anyway, but the power of dwelling among objects and actions of consequence.” “Objects of consequence” cannot be created by man alone, nor can “actions of consequence’ happen in a void; they can only be found within a framework that is larger than we are, an encompassing totality invulnerable to our worst behavior and most corrosive anxieties.
… How, more specifically, does art reveal Beauty, or Form? Like philosophy it abstracts. Art simplifies. It is never exactly equal to life. In the visual arts, this careful sorting out in favor of order is called composition, and most artists know its primacy.
Beauty in Photography by Robert Adams
Comments are welcome!
barbararachkoscoloreddust.com 
Q: Another interesting series of yours that has impressed me is your recent “Black Paintings.” The pieces in this series are darker than the ones in “Domestic Threats.” You create an effective mix between the dark background and the few bright tones, which establish such a synergy rather than a contrast, and all the dark creates a prelude to light. It seems to reveal such a struggle, a deep tension, and intense emotions. Any comments on your choice of palette and how it has changed over time?
Dec 6
Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust
West 29th Street studio
A: That is a great question!
You are correct that my palette has darkened. It’s partly from having lived in New York for so long. This is a generally dark city. We famously dress in black and the city in winter is mainly greys and browns.
Also, the “Black Paintings” are definitely post-9/11 work. My husband, Bryan, was tragically killed onboard the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. Losing Bryan was the biggest shock I ever have had to endure, made even harder because it came just 87 days after we had married. We had been together for 14 ½ years and in September 2001 were happier than we had ever been. He was killed so horribly and so senselessly. Post 9/11 was an extremely difficult, dark, and lonely time.
In the summer of 2002 I resumed making art, continuing to make “Domestic Threats” paintings. That series ran its course and ended in 2007. Around then I was feeling happier and had come to better terms with losing Bryan (it’s something I will never get over but dealing with loss does get easier with time). When I created the first “Black Paintings” I consciously viewed the background as literally, the very dark place that I was emerging from, exactly like the figures emerging in these paintings. The figures themselves are wildly colorful and full of life, so to speak, but that black background is always there.
Comments are welcome!
Share this:
Like this:
Posted in An Artist's Life, Art in general, Art Works in Progress, Black Paintings, Creative Process, Domestic Threats, Inspiration, Painting in General, Pastel Painting, Photography, Studio, Working methods
Comments Off on Q: Another interesting series of yours that has impressed me is your recent “Black Paintings.” The pieces in this series are darker than the ones in “Domestic Threats.” You create an effective mix between the dark background and the few bright tones, which establish such a synergy rather than a contrast, and all the dark creates a prelude to light. It seems to reveal such a struggle, a deep tension, and intense emotions. Any comments on your choice of palette and how it has changed over time?
Tags: "Black Paintings", after, always, another, around, art, background, better, between, biggest, black, bright, browns, Bryan, changed, choice, city, colorful, comments, consciously, continuing, contrast, correct, course, crashed, create, dark, dealing, deep, difficult, Domestic Threats, dress, easier, effective, emerging, emotions, ended, endure, establish, exactly, extremely, famously, feeling, figures, first, full, generally, great, greys, happier, harder, horribly, however, husband, impressed, intense, interesting, killed, life, light, literally, lived, lonely, losing, loss, mainly, making, married, mix, New York, onboard, paintings, palette, partly, Pentagon, pieces, plane, post-9/11, prelude, question, rather, recent, resumed, reveal, senselessly, September, series, shock, something, speak, struggle, summer, synergy, tension, terms, themselves, time, together, tones, tragically, viewed, wildly, winter, work