A: I have published favorite quotes on the website, but for anyone who has not read them, please see the above photo or https://barbararachko.art/en/

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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.

A creative process is a philosophical search, shaped by matters of practice and procedure that extend from the first touch of the artist’s pencil, brush, or chisel to the final decisions about what constitutes completeness.

Stylistic particularism – the decision as to what kind of abstract or representational artist you’re going to be – shapes, deepens, and extends the artist’s imaginative powers. Most artists who work for many years see their style evolve, sometimes dramatically. In the 1930s and 1940s Giacometti, who had first been admired for Surrealist sculptures in which representational elements are set in essentially abstract structures, found himself increasingly focused on the direct observation of the human figure. What by the mid-1940s could look like a wholesale transformation of his artistic language was the result of individual decisions all of which, during Giacometti’s career of nearly five decades, interlocked. They reinforced one another. They added up.

Between Abstraction and Representation by Jed Perl in The New York Review of Books, November 24, 2022

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“Trickster” (left) and “Sacrificial,” while the latter was in-progress

A: It is fascinating to play around with scale. For starters, it helps demonstrate how my pastel techniques and my approach to the subject matter are evolving. I’ve noticed that I always see and depict more details the second time around.

Typically, I prefer the second pastel painting over the first one depicting the same subject. Man Ray famously said:

“There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love. There are simply different ways of doing it.”

I disagree with him. I am an optimist who believes that artists cannot help but improve over time. It’s one of the things that gets me into my studio: the idea that my creative process and my ways of using pastel are changing for the better. I like to think this represents some sort of creative progress. But still I sometimes have to wonder, is the idea of ‘progress’ just something artists tell ourselves in order to keep going?

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In the 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.

Be more than ready. Be present in your discipline. Remember your gift. Be grateful for your gift and treat it like a gift. Cherish it, take care of it, and pass it on. Use your time to bathe yourself in that gift. Move your hand across the canvas. Go to museums. Make this into an obsession.

… what you are will show, ultimately. Start now, every day, becoming in your actions, your regular actions, what you would like to become in the bigger scheme of things.

Anna Deveare 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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Exploring Orongo, Rapa Nui

*favorite travel photos that have not yet appeared in this blog

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Departing from Paro Airport in Bhutan

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

… a lot of times you take a trip halfway around the world. You think the trip is for one thing… and you came away with something else. You change in a way you did not expect. These are the lessons that come well after school, college, training, apprenticeships. These lessons are not full courses; they are two sentences long. I felt I had gotten a degree in two minutes.

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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Work in progress

A: I am planning my next pastel painting and the photo above shows a preliminary charcoal sketch for it. I’m continuing to study the effects of scaling my work up or down. This piece will be a smaller, 26” x 20,” version of “The Orator,” 38” x 58” (image), 50” x 70” (framed), from 2017.

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*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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Barbara’s studio (since April 1997)

A:  I last answered this question in my blog more than ten years ago and I would say similar things now to what I said then.

Be sure that you love your process unconditionally because there is no relationship between how hard you will work and how much money you will earn, period.  Indeed, with inflation and rapidly evolving ways of doing business, it seems to cost more money every year to be an artist.  As I’ve said often, be prepared to work very, very hard. Really it’s all about making the most of your gifts as an artist.  If you don’t feel a deep responsibility to developing your talents as far as possible, you won’t have what it takes to keep going.  Countless artists quit and no one can blame them.  You absolutely must love your materials and your creative process and be willing to do whatever it takes to continue making art.  

This is not a life for slackers!

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

Because solitude provides artists with a safe haven, fits their personality, and offers them a kind of communal contact with other human beings through their work, it can also serve as a breeding ground for stagnation. Without ever quite realizing it, artists can grow flaccid in isolation and begin to experience their solitude as deadening. The studio can become too easy and unchallenging a place.

The world outside the studio offers unmatched opportunities for growth and for the expression of authentic and courageous behavior. Artists often miss these opportunities and, remaining relatively untested, handle themselves poorly when they do venture out.

Eric Maisel in A Life in the Arts: Practical Guidance and Inspiration for Creative and Performing Artists

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