Plunging into pastels
Sunday, August 28, 2011 at 5:13PM Ten years ago, I did a series of pastel paintings of potted African violets, sitting on the cold hardwood floor of Tina's composing studio in the house that she'd owned for twenty years near the University of Pennsylvania. They were big, messy, wild bursts of energy, wrenchingly difficult for me to do. Two of them hang in enormous frames in our living room, and have reminded me every day for all these years that I need to muster the resolve to work in pastels again. I've done it a few times since then, and the painting that appears with the very first article on this blog is one of them, now in a collection near Philadelphia. But those instances have been isolated, separated by months and years of my pastels waiting to be used again.
So today, in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, I've begun a new piece. It will not be a single sitting work as have been all the studies I've posted here in the last couple of months. I'm being a bit savage with my frankly sensitive ego and putting it out here in an early stage as it sits on my studio work table. We'll see together where it goes from here, and whether or not I do it again soon.
Beginning a pastel interpretation of the current pipe clutter on my worktable, 11 1/2 x 15 on BFK Rives
Okay, I really can't see this objectively at all. Time to stop for the night and look at it with fresh eyes in the morning. Right now . . . well, we'll look again in the morning.
It was bugging me last night that the pipe tamper was a blurry ghost, but I didn't trust myself to go back into it successfully then. Good that I waited until this morning. I think we're finished here, Irene.
Reader Comments (1)
Zounds! I love this. The intensity of the color and the cascading depth is just wonderful.