Blog Archives
Pearls from artists* # 459

*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Naturally we want freedom, flow and harmony in our work. These are qualities that give it eloquence. But we cannot find this flow by avoiding the obstacles that arise upon starting out. We welcome the resistances and then apply our God given ammunition – our imagination, energy and will – and finally watch the obstacles dissolve. Only then can we enjoy the new-found freedom and flow until the next obstacle appears. And the struggle begins anew. And hence, the paradox: we cultivate resistance in order to free our path of resistance. Real power is the removal of resistance from your path.
Anne Bogart in A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theatre
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Q: How has photography changed your approach to painting?

A: Except for many hours spent in life-drawing classes and still life setups that I devised when I was learning my craft in the 1980s, I have always worked from photographs. My late husband, Bryan, would shoot 4” x 5” negatives of my elaborate “Domestic Threats” setups using his Toyo-Omega view camera. I rarely picked up a camera except when we were traveling. After Bryan was killed on 9/11, I inherited his extensive (film) camera collection – old Nikons, Leicas, Graphlex cameras, etc. – and needed to learn how to use them. Starting in 2002 I enrolled in a series of photography courses (about 10 over 4 years) at the International Center of Photography in New York. I learned how to use all of Bryan’s cameras and how to make my own big color prints in the darkroom.
Early on I discovered that the sense of composition, color, and form I had developed over many years as a painter translated well into photography. The camera was, and is, just another medium with which to express ideas. Pastel painting will always be my first love. However, pastel paintings take months of work, while photography offers instant gratification, especially with my current preferred camera, an iPad Pro.
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Q: What’s on the easel today?

Preliminary charcoal sketch in progress.
A: I am starting a new preliminary sketch for my next pastel painting. This will be number nine in the “Bolivianos” series!
In 2018 I made six new pastel paintings, which is more than usual. The last time I created six in one year was 1996!
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Pearls from artists* # 207
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
More than in any other vocation, being an artist means always starting from nothing. Our work as artists is courageous and scary. There is no brief that comes along with it, no problem solving that’s given as a task… An artist’s work is almost entirely inquiry based and self-regulated. It is a fragile process of teaching oneself to work alone, and focusing on how to hone your quirky creative obsessions so that they eventually become so oddly specific that they can only be your own.
“What It Really Takes to Be an Artist: MacArthur Genius Teresita Fernandez’s Magnificent Commencement Address,” by Maria Popova in “brainpickings”
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Q: How do you decide how much realism and how much imagination to put into a pastel painting?
A: I wouldn’t say “decide” is the right word because creating a painting is not strictly the result of conscious decisions. I think of my reference photograph, my preliminary sketch, and the actual folk art objects I depict as starting points. Over the months that it takes to make a pastel painting, the resulting interpretive development pushes the painting far beyond this source material. When all goes well, the original material disappears and characters that belong to the painting and nowhere else emerge.
It is a mysterious process that I am still struggling to understand. This is the best way I can describe what it feels like from the inside, as the maker.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 155
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Throughout these many years of painting I have practiced starting my work from reality stating the facts before me. Then I paint without the object for a certain length of time, combining reality and imagination.
I have often obtained in painting directly from the object that which appears to be real results at the very first shot, but when that does happen, I purposely destroy what I have accomplished and re-do it over and over again. In other words that which comes easily I distrust. When I have condensed and simplified sufficiently I know that I have achieved more than reality.
Yasuo Kumiyoshi: East to West in The Creative Process, edited by Brewster Ghiselin
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Q: Would you talk about your use of Mexican and Guatemalan folk art as a convenient way to study formal properties such as color, shape, pattern, composition, etc. in your pastel paintings?
A: For me an interesting visual property of these objects is that they readily present themselves as a vehicle for exploring formal artistic properties, like color, pattern, shape, etc. especially compared to my earlier subject matter: hyper-realistic portraits and still-lifes. Intent as I was on creating verisimilitude in the earlier work, there was little room for experimentation.
Many Mexican and Guatemalan folk art objects are wildly painted and being a lover of color, their brilliant colors and patterns are what initially attracted me. As a painter I am free to use their actual appearance as my starting point. I photograph them out-of-focus and through colored gels in order to change their appearance and make them strange, enacting my own particular version of “rendering the familiar strange.” Admittedly these objects are not so familiar to begin with.
When I make a pastel painting I look at my reference photograph and I also look at the objects, positioning them within eye-shot of my easel. There is no need whatsoever to be faithful to their actual appearance so my imagination takes over. As I experiment with thousands of soft pastels, with shape, with pattern, with composition, and all the rest, I have one goal in mind – to create the best pastel-on-sandpaper painting I am capable of making.
Comments are welcome!