In the Minority

— 11/01/2004, by MELISSA BALDRIDGE (Curator of Collections – The Torch Energy Advisors)

When Bernard Pracko paints, he ventures within. Indeed, he has lived and worked in some of the country’s most breathtaking settings – the southwestern deserts, the southern California coast and the Rocky Mountains. Yet his artworks document an internal journey rather than a response to the external world.

For Pracko, his artwork is a petition, a prayer, a meditation. His goal – to mirror a sacred space on canvas. He follows in the steps of a century-long line of modern artists like Wassily Kandinsky who cut the moorings of representation and painted an inner reality. “I value only those artists who really are artists, that is, who consciously or unconsciously … embody the expression of their inner life,” Kandinsky says in his treatise, Concerning The Spiritual in Art. Throughout his life, Pracko has shown a growing awareness of the spiritual world, including receiving a master’s degree in theology. In his artwork, Pracko taps his connection to the divine and directs it to canvas.

His interest in art begins with genetics. Artistic creativity runs up his mother’s line of the family, and she descends from the expatriate American artist Benjamin West, who executed grand historical and Romantic paintings for King George III. Both his mother and grandmother were also painters.

Pracko grew up near a Navajo reservation in Farmington, N.M., where he was exposed to the Natives’ rich legacy of textiles, jewelry making and pottery. With a chemistry major from the University of Colorado, he did some textile conservation and traded Native wares. Despite his immersion in the applied arts of southwestern desert artisans, Pracko left creative endeavors and directed his energies in the high-charged world of business – financial consulting, deal structuring, commercial real estate and public company mergers and acquisitions.

His decision to develop as an artist came after he studied at the Tomatis Center in Phoenix. Dr. Alfred A. Tomatis was a French ear, nose and throat specialist who developed a revolutionary program for people with disabilities like autism, dyslexia and ADD. The Tomatis Method helps students tune out white noise and other distracting stimuli to listen more effectively with both the inner ear and the entire body. There, Pracko honed his listening skills to harvest sound from various sources.

After his Tomatis coursework, Pracko sought an outlet for a newly unleashed creativity, and he bought a grand piano. Frustrated with his slow progress in learning to play, he rented a studio and took drawing and lithography courses at Arizona State University. With his back-to-back immersions in the two disciplines, Pracko discovered overlap in the two art forms – how music has coloration and conversely, how he chooses colors in his artwork from internal, inaudible sounds.

The Greek mathematician Pythagoras described this phenomenon of sounds and divine harmonies as the “Music of the Spheres.”
He believed that the planets in orbit, and by extension all of nature’s cycles and rhythms, emit inaudible sounds and music in perfect harmony, which reveal the highest universal realities. Pythagoras described these harmonies mathematically. In Bernard Pracko’s artwork, he illustrates his experience of the divine in colors he associates with such sonance. For example, in his work Untitled 92/6P, Pracko recalls hearing bells tinkling, and his bright, crystalline forms appear to represent the sound.

Both how Pracko receives his inspiration and his very act of painting are physical. He lays his large unstretched canvases on the floor in the tradition of the Abstract Expressionists. On his knees, Pracko uses his hands, window washer squeegees, stipple brushes and paint floggers – floppy brushes for flinging paint. On one canvas – Life – he twisted the canvas up, poured paint inside it, swung it overhead and threw it on the floor. When he unwound the canvas, the paint had traveled to key spots within the composition.

Incredibly, Pracko is color-blind. His solution is to paint colors he sees – purples, blues, yellows, black and red appear often in his work. One obvious inspiration for Pracko is the work of the Color-Field painters – Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Mark Rothko, Paul Jenkins and Sam Francis. Pracko saturates his canvases with layer after layer of acrylic paint, creating an atmospheric quality like gaseous, light-filled nebulae and black holes of deep space.

Pracko also feels an affinity for the work of Chilean Surrealist painter Roberto Matta. Though Matta’s dreamlike biomorphic creatures have a three-dimensional life of their own in a surreal picture space, Pracko’s imagery is pre-Gothic, flat, and symbolic. Serpents, stars, the stars of Solomon’s Seal, and crosses populate his canvases as in Untitled 92/7P.

Untitled 92/7P

Pracko painted shamanic figures in The Hierophant, only later to discover their role as initiators in sacred rituals in early Christianity.

The Heirophant

Also, symbols unassociated with early Christianity crop up routinely – triangles and pyramids, ankhs, orbs, and otherworldly figures. (See Untitled 92/7P and Untitled 92/21).

Untitled 92/21

Kandinsky warned that artwork divorced from spirituality is merely decorative. “In each artistic circle are thousands of such artists, of whom the majority seek only for some new technical manner, and who produce millions of works of art without enthusiasm, with cold hearts and souls asleep,” Kandinsky says. Clearly, Pracko is in the minority, and he seeks a higher end for himself – to produce artworks that resonate with spiritual truth.