Pastels

If there's been a day in the last couple of years when I haven't thought about pulling out a box of soft pastels to go larger than a sketchbook page, I can't remember it. The weeks of procrastinating have accumulated into months and years. I know that part of my issue is that, believe it or not, I'm by nature neat and fastidious, and soft pastels are a messy medium. Pigmented dust gets all over my hands, clothes, and everything in the general vicinity where I'm working. My mother likes to tell people that I used to cry as a baby when I got food on my hands or face. I didn't like going barefooted outdoors because my feet got dirty. I hated wading in ponds because I didn't like the feeling of mud squishing between my toes. I had to train myself to be okay with the many such things I had to deal with in my everyday life growing up as a farm boy. I had to throw myself into it with a certain anger and violence.

Today I used that old technique, goading myself into putting a couple sheets of Rives BFK into a chipboard folding portfolio, grabbing a small box of seldom used Rembrandt pastels out of my bookcase cabinet, and throwing them in the back of the old Saab. Driving out across the somber fields stripped by the harvest, trees mostly bare from the storm that tore through earlier this week, I pulled the car off onto the edge of a corn field on Longnecker Road and set myself up on the Saab's hood, a pair of bulldog clips holding my paper to the chipboard folder in the brisk, cold wind, a cluster of farm structures in front of me under the ragged grey sky. And I got my hands dirty.

farm on Longnecker Road, 22" x 18 1/2", soft pastel and colored pencils on Rives BFK paper

Comments

[toby]

" And I got my hands dirty."

So worth it. Great result, Scott. I think you should do more dirty work.