Blog Archives

“Scene Thirteen: Bathroom,” 26″ x 20″, soft pastel on sandpaper

“He Urged Her to Abdicate,” 58″ x 38,” soft pastel on sandpaper

A: At first I didn’t know what to call them. I was looking for a word that meant “a piece of some larger whole.” Initially the word “shard” – a fragment of pottery – came to mind. However, that didn’t capture the meaning I was seeking, since my paintings have little to do with pottery.

My large “Domestic Threats” paintings are theatrical. There is substantial labor and much thought involved in their creation, so I often think of myself as a director and each image as a play.

Small “Domestic Threats” paintings are made from a portion of a photograph that I use as reference for a larger painting. For example, “Scene Thirteen: Bathroom” (above, top) is a small version of “He Urged Her to Abdicate” (above, bottom).

A “portion” of a play is a “Scene” so that’s what I finally named them. Additionally, I numbered the paintings in order of their creation and added the room where each takes place.

Comments are welcome!

Posted in 2015, An Artist's Life, Creative Process, Domestic Threats, Inspiration, Pastel Painting, Photography, Working methods

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Pearls from artists* # 131

Feb 18

Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust

Self-portrait at an architect’s estate in 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.

Sister Corita

Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules

Rule 1: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for a while.

Rule 2: General duties of a student: pull everything out of your teacher. Pull everything out of your fellow students.

Rule 3: General duties of a teacher: Pull everything out of your students.

Rule 4: Consider everything an experiment.

Rule 5: Be self-disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.

Rule 6: Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail. There’s only make.

Rule 7: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.

Rule 8: Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.

Rule 9: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.

Rule 10: “We’re breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.” John Cage

Helpful Hints: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully, often. Save everything – it might come in handy later.

There should be new rules next week.

Quoted in The Art Life: On Creativity and Career by Stuart Horodner

Comments are welcome!

Posted in 2015, An Artist's Life, Art in general, Creative Process, Inspiration, Pearls from Artists, Photography, Quotes, Sri Lanka, Travel, Working methods

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Pearls from artists* # 120

Dec 3

Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust

In the studio, Photo: Britta Konau

* 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 solitude artists can experiment, make a mess, sustain notes for the joy of it, imagine themselves on any stage in any play. In the studio or practice room, they are not on display and need not wear their public face. They can be their silent selves, their worst selves. If there is unfreedom on the stage or in the gallery, there is freedom in the studio. As the visual artist Allen Kaprow put it, “Artists’ studios do not look like galleries, and when an artist’s studio does, everyone is suspicious.” Galleries are for show; studios are where messes are made and where the real work happens.

Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts

Comments are welcome!

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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Pearls from artists* # 116

Nov 5

Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust

Preliminary sketch

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

What is the point of all the discipline, hard work, and training? What does the training and preparation have to do with rehearsing a play and with performance? The training and the discipline and the sweating and the study and the memorizing are not the end point, but rather the entry. The preparation is what gives one the permission to take up space and make wild, surprising, and untamed choices. In the quest for artistic freedom and agency it is impossible to walk into a rehearsal room uninhibited, unburdened. We are generally chained down by habits and assumptions and by fear of the new. Permission is what we earn by the sweat, training, preparatory work and dedication.

Anne Bogart in What’s the Story: Essays in art, theater, and storytelling

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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

Comments are welcome!

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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Q: What is your earliest visual memory?

Mar 8

Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust

Arizona road

A: I remember being in a crib at the house where I lived with my parents and sister, a two bedroom Cape Cod in Clifton, New Jersey. I must have been about two or three years old. The crib was next to a wall and I remember putting my right leg through the slats to push against it and rock my crib. I spent hours looking at the space age wallpaper in the room, which depicted ringed planets and flying sci-fi space men. My parents had recently bought the house and the bedroom’s previous occupant had been a boy. This was in the 1950s and I dare say, the wallpaper was very much of its era!

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Posted in 2014, An Artist's Life, Creative Process, Inspiration, Travel

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Pearls from artists* # 80

Feb 26

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.

Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair. But the painting [“The Goldfinch,” 1654, by C. Fabritius] has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time. And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life – whatever else it is – is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time – so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

Donna Tartt in The Goldfinch

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Posted in 2014, An Artist's Life, Art in general, Inspiration, New York, NY, Painting in General, Pearls from Artists, Photography, Quotes, The West Village

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Q: How do you feel about accepting commissions?

Feb 22

Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust

“Reunion,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″, 1990

A: By the time I left the Navy in 1989 to devote myself to making art, I had begun a career as a portrait painter. I needed to make money, this was the only way I could think of to do so, and I had perfected the craft of creating photo-realistic portraits in pastel. It worked for a little while.

A year later I found myself feeling bored and frustrated for many reasons. I didn’t like having to please a client because their concerns generally had little to do with art. Once I ensured that the portrait was a good (and usually flattering) likeness, there was no more room for experimentation, growth, or creativity. I believed (and still do) that I could never learn all there was to know about soft pastel. I wanted to explore color and composition and take this under-appreciated medium as far as possible. It seemed likely that painting portraits would not allow me to accomplish this. Also, I tended to underestimate the amount of time needed to make a portrait and charged too small a fee.

So I decided commissioned portraits were not for me and made the last one in 1990 (above). I feel fortunate to have the freedom to create work that does not answer to external concerns.

Comments are welcome!

Posted in 2014, An Artist's Life, Art in general, Creative Process, Pastel Painting, Photography

6 Comments

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Pearls from artists* # 55

Aug 28

Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust

Alexandria, VA

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

Once a work is completed, I have to wait before undertaking another. The completed work does not release me quickly. It moves its chattels slowly. The wise thing then is a change of air and of room. The new material comes to me on my walks. Whatever happens I mustn’t notice it. If I interfere, it doesn’t come any more. One fine day the work demands my help. I give myself up to it in one fell swoop. My pauses are its own. If it falls asleep my pen skids. As soon as it wakes, it gives me a shake. It couldn’t care less if I am asleep. Get up, it says, so that I can dictate. And it is not easy to follow. Its vocabulary is not of words.

Jean Cocteau in The difficulty of Being

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Posted in 2013, An Artist's Life, Art in general, Creative Process, Inspiration, Pearls from Artists, Photography, Quotes

2 Comments

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Pearls from artists* # 36

Apr 17

Posted by barbararachkoscoloreddust

Indian Ocean, Tanah Lot, Bali

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

… don’t wait for things to change, the hour of man is now and, whether you are working at the bottom of the pile or on top, if you are a creative individual you will go on producing, come hell or high water. And this is the most you can hope to do. One has to go on believing in himself, whether recognized or not, whether heeded or not. The world may seem like hell on wheels – and we are doing our best, are we not, to make it so? – but there is always room, if only in one’s own soul, to create a spot of Paradise, crazy though it may sound.

Henry Miller in Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

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Posted in 2013, Art in general, Bali and Java, Creative Process, Inspiration, Pearls from Artists, Quotes, Travel, Working methods

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Blog Archives

Q: Why do you call the small paintings in your “Domestic Threats” series, “Scenes?”

Pearls from artists* # 131

Pearls from artists* # 120

Pearls from artists* # 116

Pearls from artists* # 89

Q: What is your earliest visual memory?

Pearls from artists* # 80

Q: How do you feel about accepting commissions?

Pearls from artists* # 55

Pearls from artists* # 36

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