Blog Archives
Q: You’ve been working with the same medium and subject matter for decades. How did that begin, and how has it sustained you for so long? (Question from “Pastel, Passion, and Perseverance: An Interview with Barbara Rachko” in .ART Odyssey: Healing)
A: Back in the early 1990s I began using folk art as my subject matter, and I was incredibly lucky. More than thirty years later, I’m still working with it. As artists, we don’t know at the start whether a subject will sustain us, whether it will keep our curiosity alive. For me it has. I’ve always been fascinated by different cultures around the world, and that continues to feed the work. There’s freedom in that kind of framework.
I chose pastel on sandpaper as my medium. I don’t have to question it anymore. That choice itself has opened space to keep growing.
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Pearls from artists* # 674
Southampton, New York Photo: Susan Erlichman
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Everything about art requires dedication and presence. It is an intimate act, demanding the kind of sustained devotion we rarely lavish on other human beings. The artist’s generosity is highly impractical because there is no guarantee that it will ever be appreciated. Consider the level of optimism needed to repeatedly spend, even deplete, whatever reserves might be required to create the most superlative gift you could offer, one that is essentially given away to the world for free. The work we make is a love letter in a bottle, thrown into the ocean. It may or may not be read. We do not negotiate. like businesspeople, ‘You give me this, and I will give you that…’ We bequeath our pursuit of excellence and creative spirit to our audience, without reservation or qualification. We know what we have invested in it and sleep better because of it.
– Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
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Pearls from artists* # 648
“Apparition,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 58” x 38”
*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 prefer to speak in terms of the artist’s voice. Voice is deeper, manifested from the very core of your being. It is a synthesis of the experiences, intellectual concepts, and aesthetic interests you possess, executed in your distinctive way, in the formal, emotional, and intellectual language of your chosen medium. When successful, the realization of your voice follows a gestalt principle. The combination of your ideas and the work’s physical embodiment is greater than the sum of its parts and distinguishes your outcome from everyone else’s. If we wrote down a single concept and handed it to a dozen artists, we would get very different responses from each of them, and some works would be a stronger synthesis of ideas and execution. As Frank Stella once said, “There are no good ideas for paintings, there are only good paintings… the painting IS the idea (Saltz, 2020:42).”
The art that we recognize as having singular, identifying features, those formal aspects that allow us to immediately see a work as ‘a David Wojnarowicz’ or ‘a Julie Mehretu,’ were not the product of a singular flash of brilliance. These qualities evolved as part of a sustained, life-long, ever-deepening investigation to articulate their specific and singular vision. Our voice comes from tapping into the depths of our own consciousness, then distilling the most powerful aspects of that awareness. Voice also expands and deepens over time. It evolves along with the artist.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
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Pearls from artists* # 473
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
… slow art arose in the later eighteenth century when two massive cultural changes converged, changes that have grown more acute ever since. First: acceleration, as capitalism and advances in technology quickened the pace of everyday life in unprecedented ways. It’s no coincidence that Harmut Rosa links the origin of modernity to the quickening movement of money, vehicles, and communication. The pressures of acceleration created the need for psychological breathers or timeouts. But second, and simultaneously: Western society grew more and more secularized. As a result, occasions to slow one’s tempo became harder to access – like devotional practices requiring viewers to focus intensely on single works over long periods of time. Hence an increased need met decreased opportunities to address that need. Slow art came to supplement older sacred practices by creating social spaces for getting off the train. In sum, as culture sped up and sacred aesthetic practices waned, slow art came to satisfy our need for downtime by producing works that require sustained attention in order to experience them.
Arden Reed in Slow Art: The Experience of Looking, Sacred Images to James Turrell
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Pearls from artists* # 380
“John,” Soft Pastel on Sandpaper, 22” x 28” (image), 1989.
* 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 freedom he enjoyed came at a cost. But those fears and irritations evaporated amid the support the artists gave one another immediately after the war. A community developed that sustained them and gave them courage. “You have to have confidence amounting to arrogance, because particularly at the beginning, you’re making something that nobody asked you to make,” Elaine [de Kooning] said. “And you have to have total confidence in yourself, and in the necessity of what you’re doing.” That was much easier done in a group of like-minded individuals.
Mary Gabriel in Ninth Street Women
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