BARBARA KACICEK / DRAWINGS: MOONFLOWER

Charcoal on paper / 10 x 10"

To Touch Immortality

"What I really want to express in my work is love, beauty, and spirit," says artist Barbara Kacicek. Kacicek is one of the few contemporary artists who have chosen drawing as their primary medium.

"Drawing ... is such an intimate, honest expression," she explains. Her intention is to capture in "in purely visual poetics the interplay between memory and emotion and imagination, to create a world of things recalled from my own experience." She emphasizes that as this is female experience, it brings forth a distinct way of looking a the body and the world.

Kacicek carefully builds up her graphite and charcoal images layer by layer, as an Old Master painter would use glazes. Her drawings, such as Birth of Venus, often take about six months of solid drawing to complete. Each has a vivid three-dimensionality, a sense of depth that is more than physical. The artist says, "The reason they look the way they do is that I like to imbue each thing with life, to bring it to a sort of peak of experience."

Kacicek often uses imagery that has very personal significance to her, but that has universal meaning as well. The combination of lunar and solar elements, for example, represents the melding of the intuitive, unconscious, female realm with the "solar" way of reason, reflection and objectivity. Her symbology, she says, is usually related to immortality. "What I'm attempting to do in my work is to express my experience as a spiritual being living a physical life on this planet."

The work of fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance masters has been a chief influence of Kacicek's artistic development. "What really attracts me to the Old Master paintings and drawings," she says, "is that they took so much care in their craft. What I see today is there's not much craft, and not much heart." Kacicek painstakingly invests these into her evocative drawings, making each a unique and indelible statement.

- Susan Osmond, Editor, The World & I

ASSOUF by TINARIWEN

NAKID MAHEDJAK YA ASSOUF ERHLALAN

What can I do with this eternal longing

IHANIMANIN DOULHIN ERAKHAN
Which inhabits my soul and my heart in flames

KIK IMIDIWAN INDEK ISSANAN
My friends, who can know

AWA ISSASMADHEN OULH ERAKHAN
What can cool a heart that burns

ATHASSAN ADOUNIA NASSADHAN ITRAN
The world sleeps and I count the stars

SADHANAKHAN SAWADHAKN YOULHIN ERKHAN
I count them and I stoke my burning heart

DIHADH TATHAS ADOUNIA INSAN
When everything lies down and sleeps

AHIDITIS ASSOUF SIMAN IKNAN
And suffuses my heart and my soul