Making Pastels - Continued

White Bunkhouse

8.75" x 9.5"

Pastel

Casey Klahn

Many, if not most, of the colors in this pastel work are done with my home-made pastels. The blue-grays, one of the oranges, some of the blues, and the grays are my own made-by-hand pastel sticks.

Yesterday, we gathered our tools, and I promised to show you how to make pastels with no expensive purchases, just to get you started. We are going to make a stick from your easel tailings (dust that fell off of your paintings in production). Then, we'll just briefly touch on repairing broken sticks, and then we'll talk about making your own authentic colors.

The left over dust from your easel can be segregated at time of gathering to be mostly red, green or whatever. Or, if you just mix them all together, you will get a beautiful gray result. Pour out that jar of tailings onto your smooth-surface work area. Best to have your latex or vinyl gloves and dust mask on, as pigment can be harmful to one's health. Simple precautions should suffice.


We won't need the Gum Trag. or other bodies because your substance already has the manufacturer's binder and body. We're taking our first, easy steps, here.


Put a paper towel around that spray bottle with a rubber band, so that you can change it out for the next color that you want to mix cleanly. Make a mashed potato-like pile (or a mini volcano, if you will) and spray water into your pigment.
Pastel is a paste, so think pancake batter for consistency.


Roll the paste in your hand until you achieve a stick. If it's too wet, dab it with a paper towel. If it has cracks, then add a little water at a time until you get it like I show above. I take the extra effort of forming it up against a right angle of glass that I have taped to my glass surface in order to make it square. Many reasons support the square model, but I do it mainly to differentiate my sticks from most store-bought ones. I make them big.


The next few steps will be without photos, but you'll be fine. It's a bear trying to not muck on one's brand new Nikon Camera while making these messy pastels! Also, the next steps are now requiring you to have a supply of white pigment. The photo above shows Whiting, which is a body for making one's own colors, and not the same as white pigment, which I show down below. I bought mine at Daniel Smith, but several suppliers exist. I guess I went with DS because I could visit the retail store in Seattle to hand pick my materials.

1. Split your big stick into roughly two equal parts.
2. Pour out white pigment on your surface equal to the size of your original pile of pigment.
3. Combine the two and spray with a little water. Roll til you get the right consistency, adding or subtracting water as needed.
4. Keep following the same regimen of halving each stick and adding white until you get to the last one which will be roughly the size of your first "pure" color stick. Now you have a set of one hue in lightening tints. Perhaps about five or six in all.
5. Stop here for now, or decide to make your tones or shades of dark. If you wish to continue, clean your surface completely with glass cleaner, and change out the towel on your spray bottle. Wash, or change your gloves.
6. Get out the carbon or lamp black and start over. The blacks come in jars, typically. Of course, a grayer color of each hue may be achieved by mixing hues in the classic painting methods. Another good way to do some minor color mixing is to add liquid pigment, which I also use for underpainting.

Createx Liquid Pigment

The drying process takes days. Three or more in marine climates (Western Washington, England, etc.) and about three where I live in Eastern Washington (almost out of the marine zone, dryish climate). I took over an old food dehydrator that we had for the purpose, which I'm still in the doghouse with my spouse about ;) You can still test the color even when it's wet, though.


Now that we have done some incredible grays, we can clean up and grab that broken yellow remains, and disperse it as a pile of dust, add water, and roll into a paste. Dry, and there's your long lost buddy!


Now, go here for the super-secret, never before revealed and extra-classified formula for making your own custom colors. I owe Paul de Marrais a debt of gratitude for his openness in revealing this "state" secret. It is, hands down, the most workable and simple formula for starting your exploration into pastel making.


Are you ready for it? 2/3rds Calcium Carbonate (Whiting) to 1/3rd French Talc, and make a paste. SSSHHHHH! Now eat the formula! No! Not the paste, the note! At this point, you'll want to but some dry pigment. I recommend French Ultramarine for starters.


As de Marrias explains, the task is now to take your formula paste and mix it with the pigment, in much the same way that I have taught you to add the white or black. The impact on the color of the pigment is minimal, and you will have a very soft pastel as a result. I have experimented with going half the magic formula, half French Ultramarine pigment, and also with going 2/3rds the blue, and 1/3rd the "body". Both work very well. My next move will be to try to "channel" Henri Roche, and make an almost all pigment blue stick.


Did you notice that we haven't touched the Gum Tragacanth, yet? Keep that bag shut, sports fans. It turns out that many pigments have enough cohesive qualities that the binder isn't needed at all. If you so desire, you may want to experiment with the binder to make harder sticks, which are good for drawing, blocking in, and initial steps of a pastel work.


This brings us to the downside of our subject, which is that all pigments are not created equal. Some have more cohesive characteristics than others. It's just the plain facts of the matter - pigments are derived from natural elements, as well as some man-made efforts such as Manganese Blue, ferric-ferrocyanide (Prussian Blue), and Alizarin (Madder). Blue is one of the happy colors that are easy to work with. The linked websites below have details on what are the troubled pigments - those harder to make into soft, workable sticks. Different amounts of the binder (Gum Tragacanth) and the Whiting/Talc formula are what you'll need to experiment with to get your particular pigment "right".


I have been lucky, so far, with the colors that I have mixed. I have not yet needed a binder to add either cohesion or consistency to any of my pastels.


I also credit Kitty Wallis with giving me my first experiences with home-made pastels. She actually markets a product that takes the mixing of the water out of the equation. She has done the hard part, and put it in a jar for you to just start rolling paste sticks. Her Pastel Moist Pigments can be found here, along with the Createx Liquid Pigments that I really love. I know they are expensive, but the full set will produce more sticks than you can shake a, well, a dollar at. The factor is well in your favor. I came back from Kitty's workshop with eighty sticks, which is greater than $260 worth of the little gems. She also sells them in individual jars, so you don't need to pop for the whole set.


I chose the adventure of making the sticks from scratch, just like any artist who lived before the Nineteenth century had to. I wanted the earthy, craft-side of the artist's tools to be part of my repertoire. I do call myself a "colorist", after all!


Now we have covered making one's own simple grays in multiple values with easel left-overs (the one I made for the photos presented here is already dry and turns out to be a dark violet-gray-which Lorie calls "eggplant"), recovering a broken stick, and two simple resources for how to make soft pastels (de Marrais and Wallis ).


Articles on Making Pastels:

• Paul de Marrais. Via Daniel Smith.
• Katherine Tyrell's Squidoo Lens, and scroll down to "Making your own pastels".
• Sinopia; I emphasize this one which Katherine has linked, because it is relatively simple, and has well organized formulas for given color groups. The groupings are designed to help you get ahead of the curve regarding pigments that are less satisfactory for handling qualities. I suggest letting the pigment tell you first, though. I found that the hansa yellow light from Daniel Smith was fine without binder.
  

Readable articles about pigments:

• Golden.
• Sennelier.
• Wikipedia.
• Webexhibits.org/pigments.

New Web Site

Announcing my new web site. It is (of course!) under construction. Go ahead and save it, but pending my release of my original URL, which is CaseyKlahn.com, I will be here, for now.

• http://www.FineArtStudioOnline.com/CaseyKlahn

Enjoy! Pop a champagne cork! Pour some in a cup! Strike up the band!

Get Busy Making Pastels

Have some fun, and save money on expensive pastels, by making some of your own sticks. It's easier than one may have heard. Some of the information online is positively frenetic with how complex and difficult it should be. Don't believe it!

I will link to the super-secret and classified extra special and need-to-know web page that will provide you, a commoner and civilian, with the ultra evil and never before revealed magic formula that will de-mystify and reveal HOW TO MAKE ONE'S OWN PASTELS! Keep it under your hat, and reveal this to no one. Eat the instructions when you have completed your mission.

Are you on the edge of your seat? Good. Let's begin by gathering our tools and supplies. At first, you can even participate without buying anything expensive in the way of art supplies. Let's look at my photo of materials, but keep in mind that it is inclusive of the most supplies that you may want. For this basic session, you will only need items # 1, 2, 5, 6 and 7.

Gather the following:

1. The bits and pieces of broken pastels that are too small to use anymore. Seen at the left side of the photo in a dish is a broken yellow Diane Townsend, and in the little cardboard box are some mixed color bits and pieces.
2. In the glass jar are the tailings from my easel, all colors. I keep a length of mat board, shaped in a "V", on the easel tray and under my artwork. Then, it gathers the dust that falls, and I pour it (hold your breath) into a jar.
3. Also note two jars of store-bought pigment (optional: you can make pastels for now without these). This is expensive stuff. However, the quantity of pastel sticks that one can make by hand would set you back much more if you were to buy them on the retail market. It is the same pigment that goes into every colored thing on the planet: automobiles, oil paint, printer cartridges, etc. Pigment is pigment. These are powdered (which is pigment's original form) and are sold for artist's use in making paint, pastels, etc.
4. (Optional at this time) The white bags are various products to add to your pigments as "body" and/or binders when we start making our own new colors. From left to right: Titanium White (Black will be in a jar like the other pigments), Whiting, Gum Tragacanth, French Chalk (Talc), and Pumice Powder. These represent more Additives than you will need for the most basic pastel making.
5. I use a glass surface for my mixing and paste rolling. This circular piece of glass was surplussed (free) from a retail-supply store. If you live in Italy, the glass may be substituted with marble, which is cheaper than dirt in your mountainous country. Be creative and use whatever is easy to clean between different color mixings.
   
6. (Not Shown) A smallish spray bottle to meter out your water in a measured way.
7. Dust masks, latex gloves, paper towels, and Windex (spray glass-cleaner). You might want to resource a shop apron, and you will need old clothes and dedicated footwear (old tennis shoes, or rubber boots). Everything will launder-up fine, though.
   

Since my time is cramped, today, I'll let you just get these things together and go with the actual making pastels, complete with links, in my next installment.

Pastel Chums

Local Chums. And, more than that, the artists listed here are representing the passion, merit and quality of the pastel medium. Some also work in oil and other media, but I note them here in their work as pastelists.

Susan Ogilvie
lives on the remote Olympic Peninsula, an area close to my heart. Her use of color is graced by expertise and energy. She confides that her latest passion has been working with textural hand applied grounds, and she is always pushing artistic boundaries.

Jennifer Evenhus
is a Master Pastelist with the PSA, whose work makes every advantage of surprising and stunning color choices. She creates the loosest, most fascinating images I have ever seen. Eclectic subject choices also compliment her local subject matter (Beautiful Central Washington).
She's the only one of this group of chums with a blog. Way to go, Jennifer!

Sheila Evans
lives very close, in Spokane. Her work in botanical subjects graces the catalog cover (and web banner) of Dakota Art since she won the juried contest last year. She continues to earn well-deserved awards, and it is no wonder as she is a fantastic artist.

Marla Baggetta
of West Linn (by Portland), Oregon is my favorite landscapist in pastel. A self-described representationalist, she pushes the landscape motif beyond the real and imparts every bit as much expression in her art as any abstractionist ever does. A joy to view, her art is active and painterly. (Don't think: "trite" when I say painterly - her pastels are authoritative and original!)
Her hubby, Mike, is a talented abstract expressionist who works primarily in oil.

Patty Forte-Linna
of the Seattle area does interiors, which is a genre fresh with possibilities, I think. Degas was, of course, big on figures but almost always in an interiorscape. Patty is doing passionate work that always offers some original perspective. Even her outdoor cafe and veranda images have an interiorscape sensibility, which is testament to her consistency of viewpoint.

It seems like my tastes trend towards originality and freshness.

I also want to add some other very notable pastelists whose work I am nuts over, but who are from other parts of the country, and whom I hope to meet someday.

Terri Ford
I only recently became aware of Terri Ford's work. How could I miss her beautiful cover of The Pastel Journal? Her work titled Florence Night was fresh air to me, as I am looking for examples of colorist
Italian Landscapes.







Jane Lincoln
Usually, when you say that you are influenced by an artist's palette, you mean the colors they use. While I love and admire the color use of Jane Lincoln, I was really influenced by the physical palette that she puts her pastels in! See it here. Jane teaches color theory, and practices what she preaches.

M. Katherine Hurley
Like me, Katherine Hurley is much influenced by Wolf Kahn. The great, big difference is that I am influenced by Hurley, too! Her other-worldly take on realism keys on abstracted landscape compositions. Her use of color is expressive and pleasing, too. Her work influenced me to create a series of the four seasons, as she has done, that turns on bold, original and unexpected color compositions. Ever seeking original ideas, she has done some black and white pastoral scenes in pastel that make you still think of color.

Monet Report

Katherine Tyrrell has this report on The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings installation which is going on in London now.

Is the old boy rolling over in his grave, or beaming with pride? I vote for the latter.

Pastel Month Results - The Bunkhouse

The Bunkhouse
6.5" x 8"
Original Pastel
Casey Klahn
$375

This is the first Colorist American Landscape I have done in some time. It's nice to be doing these very free, yet challenging works. I have been wanting to get back to barns and outbuildings, too. I also wanted to get some cropped barn compositions that worked.

Another good feeling is finding a method for working on Townsend Pastel paper. You can really abuse this stuff, and the more the merrier. I did a wash of deep red, then mixed as many contrasts and compliments as it would hold without "filling up", as we say.

Lots of goals coming together!

Colorist Ruminations

Casey Klahn

Competing priorities today. I need to post a "daily" painting (which I cunningly post only every 100 hours) over at my Project blog. I also want very much to keep my promise to manufacture some pastel sticks to show the readers who have been following my March pastel materials threads. Thankfully, my little kids are at pre-school again today, after missing all of last week with the flu.

I am also on the fence between two ideas for April's theme here at at The Colorist newsletter. I have been wanting to do a study of the Abstract Expressionists, complete with bad photoshops of me rubbing elbows with Lee Krasner and Robert Motherwell. That's going to be a kick in the pants! The other idea is a project relating to art criticism. It will be a participative project for the artists and writers out there in blogland. Don't worry, though, I will keep it active and interesting for everyone as I endeavor to keep my promise of "no artspeak".

Which ones to do first? I have no idea. All of the buzz right now is on my previous post where the war between commercialism and creativity has been raging. I am happy for a rousing discussion, and it makes me think that I will go ahead with my art critic thread for the month of April.

Which Artist Lives Here? Abstraction vs. Realism vs. Process - A Tag Team Battle

Ponte Vecchio - Old City

@7" x 6"
Graphite on 70gr. Sketch Paper
Casey Klahn

In the past, before I had this blog, I worked hard at unifying my work. My Colorist American Landscapes are a nicely coherent body of work, where abstracted landscapes reveal color stories that speak immediately to the viewer.

Now I have started posting both finished and process sketches, realist paintings (usually of Italy), realist farmscapes, and some abstracts. You may be asking yourself, "How many artists live here?"

I am not, as far as I know, Schizophrenic. In fact, I'll go out on a limb here, and assert that I am not. But, I do enjoy expanding my limits. Growing my artistic abilities, if you will. I have had an urge for some time to return to my realist roots. So, I started the 100 Paintings Project which stays focused on the Italian Landscape and realism, with effects of my colorist tilt. Then I put it on another blog, hopefully to reduce confusion between my styles and genres.

It's perfectly okay for Pablo Picasso to inhabit any number of genres. But not an unknown such as myself. BTW, I saw an awesome artist's tagline the other day : "So-and-so, the nation's favorite unknown artist". Anyway, my goal is to stay focused for both artistic and marketing reasons. At the art fairs, I am rigidly focused on one style for just those reasons. You have mere seconds to impress the passerby, and they don't want to be confused about how many artists are showing in that booth. Also, the fair committee takes a dim view of non-coherency.

But, here in blogger-land, I have become motivated by so many of my blogging chums and also by the famous artists that I research and oogle at on the web. So, first came some drawings. Then I fell totally off of the wagon and posted some of my abstracts, too.

Plus, I have gallerists looking in on me. They probably say, "this guy's not focused".

I am happy to be more inspired and ready for growth in my art. I want to return to figurative work, too. But, I am determined to always have a fine art body of work that stays unified. I make sure that I always have at least 40 framed pieces of these, as well. That way I can go to the art fairs and not run out, and I am ready to hang a gallery show at the same time. The probable solution for me is going to be to put up a static website that houses my Colorist American Landscapes, and keep this blog for process and broad subjects.

I am really pleased to have painted a new Colorist American Landscape around the subject of barns and outbuildings. Look for me to post it here at the end of the month.

One thing that I discovered has been the answer to a question I have been pondering for some time. I always felt that the abstracted works (see a page of them here) were harder to do for me than strict realist work where the subject is more centered on the illusions of perspective and the goal is to allow the viewer to "read" the landscape as they expect it to be. That's a forest, leading down the hill to that set of buildings. Stuff like that.

I kept thinking, "If I return to stricter reality, will the requirements of perspective and rendering be harder than these intentionally abstracted ones?" Turns out that the realist ones are easier for me, just like I suspected. They are improving as I go along, but I fail less often, and I can leave them on the easel to change a diaper, put in a movie, make lunch, etc.

On the other hand, the Colorist Landscapes require strict focus, and the finished painting needs to be done in one (or close to one) sitting. More failures happen, even though I have been at it for a number of years, now. I have found that the requirements of good abstract work are more taxing on my brain, and simple compositional mistakes have a greater impact.

Contemporary Biggies

I will leave some one out, and for that I am sorry. I have already touched on some prominent pastelists whom I favor, such as Wolf Kahn, Diane Townsend, Diana Ponting, and Kitty Wallis. Please have a look at a few more great lights of contemporary pastel work.

Daniel Greene.
I ducked into the Art Students League, by accident really. I was just passing on the street on my way to view some Wolf Kahn art on 57th in Manhattan. In the lobby of the ASL hangs a famous portrait by Greene:

Robert Beverly Hale
Former Curator, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Collection: Art Students League, New York, NY
Pastel 50" x 36"

I was mesmerized by this chance opportunity to get up close to a great work. I could see free gestural strokes not easily noted by just looking at the work in print. The life in the colors, and the whimsical border given to a conservative subject - fantastic!

See also:

• http://www.linesandcolors.com/2006/02/04/daniel-e-greene/

Harvey Dinnerstein.
Short bio. If anyone makes the case for the supremacy of figurative work, it is Dinnerstein.
I first became aware of his work through The Pastel Journal, which featured his pastels. I get the feeling he works primarily in oil, but I include him here as one of the great lights of pasteldom.

Is there anyone in NYC with a desire to fill a need? Get Harvey Dinnersteins' presence on-line spiffed up. He is the most underrepresented genius artist on the net.

When I grow up I will return to the figurative work of my youth, and I will stick myself to Dinnerstein like a fly to paper. In fact, I am moving to NYC to begin classes tomorrow. CYaL8r!

• Try this one.
• Here is a stunning one at The Art Student's League.

Alan Flatmann Cover, TPJ

Alan Flatmann
of New Orleans was this years' Hall of Fame honoree at the PSA Annual Exhibition. He likes cityscapes and figures. Also, this artist makes the case for darks (black?) in his lively images.



Albert Handell is a man of accomplishment, who has spread the wealth, so to speak, by authoring a number of books including many in the pastel genre. You don't need to feel compelled to send me this one, but I wouldn't refuse it, either.

Alpine Italy

Morning Buttress
4.5" x 4.75"
Original Pastel
Casey Klahn
$100
Plus Tax & Shipping
Buy it Now via Comment or E-Mail

Post Day at my 100 Paintings Project.

Italy Post Day

La Ca, Italy
4.5" x 4.75"
Original Pastel
Casey Klahn
$100
Plus tax & shipping, still no bidding required.
I invite you to buy it now by posting at my comments or via e-mail.


Up early this morning to wash a blankey that my 4 year-old Ameilia is crying about. It's okay, though, because I wanted to post an Italian Landscape today over at the
100 Paintings - Colorist Italian Landscapes. It looks like I've succeeded in an alpine scene. Being a broken-down alpinist, myself, I have a thing or two to say in my mountain drawings.

Meanwhile, while I wait for my intrepid photographer to chronicle that one, please enjoy this favorite from my other blog.

Getting Out of the Studio

I will be getting out of the studio a bit. Call it "Spring Cleaning" for the mind. I think it might be healthy to look at BOTA (Blogs Other Than Art) for a while. Also, the stats go down on the weekends, and I have some powerful pastel posts (that's triple P) waiting to be posted for the uptick of readership that comes on Monday.

Here are some non-art blogs that I happened upon:

http://www.bitegeist.com/
http://www.bleedingespresso-sognatrice.blogspot.com/
http://www.melindagallo.com/blog/
Okay, these last two are Italy related, which is related to my 100italianpaintings.blogspot.com. Hard to get away from the art subject!
http://kchomedad.blogspot.com/
http://www.angelfire.com/zine2/athomedad/
(Mr. Moms) Talk about a bunch of sad sacks...wait a minute! I'm one of these!

(WARNING: Potty Content & Religious Jokery, too) You will bust a gut:

http://www.funspoofs.com/View_movie_farting.html

I want to begin a general interest blog called Second Hand Sushi. Please don't steal that name! It's all my own.

Admin Note: I am having a hard time getting down to the basement to make those pastels, photograph the session, and post it. I promised to make pastels with you, so I will endeavor mightily to get 'er done. We lost a week and a half to the Flu and the whole family was laid up. Thank goodness for draft posting!
I gave some thought to making it a lens, like in Squidoo or something. But, I decided that it is not going to be an exhaustive "how to", but rather a personal "just what I do". Save those easel tailings (dust that falls off the paper will make awesome grays).
Anyway, if I fail to get it done, I will just have to post it in early April. Who knew that the pastel medium could so easily consume an entire month?

Mary Cassatt

French Legion of Honor
Mary Cassatt
click here to listen

Mother Feeding Child, 1898
Mary Cassatt

Allow me to present: Mary Cassatt (1844 - 1926).

The account in Wikipedia of Cassatts' family resisting her choice of art as a profession, and her pressing her nose against the glass of the art dealer's window to see Degas' pastels and being transformed by seeing these watershed artworks, is enough to give you goosebumps. Then, to be invited by Degas to show with the Impressionists at the height of their powers in Paris - what a story! I don't know about today, but there certainly was a glass ceiling in the 19th century when our heroine came up. She was an American, living in Paris, who was invited to show in the Impressionist exhibitions.

She is another of the great lights whose eyesight failed in the latter years of their lives. Also in the significa department are her being honored with the French Legion d'honneur in 1904, and the naming of a Liberty Ship after the old girl during WW II. Wonderful recognitions of a worthy and great pastellist.

Cassatt Self Portrait, 1878

Admin note: Republished so that you may now comment.

Good Beer and Pastels; Matched in Heaven

This gal, Crash Octopus, doesn't know that she's my long lost cousin. She posts about art, and every other post is about beer. Stout Beer.

How cool is that?

Left Hand Milk Stout and Pastels
Pastel Addiction

BTW, consume not thy pastels. That is what beer was created for.

Art Links

Sunflowers
Casey Klahn

You are invited to have a look at Rob Chunn's Art Links. Anyone else have a good list of arts and artists links?

Ever wonder what art looks like from the collector's point of view? Enjoy reading Lisa Hunter's blog here.

Seattle seems to be revving up it's art scene. See these links:

http://www.seattleartblog.com/
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/art/
http://www.artguidenw.com/

Post Day at My Other Blog

Ponte Vecchio in the Snow
Colorist Italian Landscapes
Casey Klahn

Have a look at 100 Paintings - Colorist Italian Landscapes, which is my blog project featuring small realist pastels about Italy.

Intuition and Gesture

Yellow Gesture

18" x 11"
Original Pastel
Casey Klahn
CTA

The gesture embodies the intuitive approach to art. Sure, color choice looms large. Linear composition, also big.

And I am holding drawing up as the most fundamental pursuit within the big tent that is fine art. No offense, ceramic and glass. No offense print media, and photography. But drawing is the alpha (if not the omega) of artistic expression.

So, consider the gesture. Robert Henri denigrated the gesture in his seminal book: The Art Spirit. His opinion was that the gesture cannot stand without some purpose, or composition to be a part of. However, taken as an element of expression, what else goes so close to the bone of the artist's intention as the curling, bold, climactic gesture?

In keeping with my pastel feature this month, I offer the gesture as a pigmented mark pregnant with feeling. Grab a pastel; scumble it on it's side to tone your paper. Don't think about the next color. Grab the pastel stick and make a gesture with your whole arm - No! Your whole body! How does that look to you? Can it be improved upon? Should you add some definition to it? Or should you just discard it? Another color, perhaps.

Have a seat, now, square in front of you easel, and ruminate. That's it! Get up, choose another pastel stick and gesture along the paper. Now that precious mark has been covered; changed forever.

How does the drawing look, now? Was your intuitive choice of color agony, or ecstasy?

Carriera, The Proto-Pastellist

Rosalba Carriera
Self Portrait with The Artist's Sister, 1715

Image courtesy of the

Metropolitan Museum

Rosalba Carriera (1675 - 1757), a lifelong Venetian, became a sought-after portraitist and was the world's first "pastellist".

The actual paste formed from dry pigment and water, and then dried is considered pastel (almost always with binder added to some degree or another). The first mention of this medium was by Leonardo da Vinci in 1495. Some artists used the medium thereafter, such as Quentin de La Tour, but Carriera popularized pastel works in the eighteenth century, and established a large corpus of such.

*Not incidentally, the blessed Scots also invented Whiskey in about the same year.

Pastel News

Claude Monet was no stranger to the pastel medium. The link takes you to a report about The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings (short pdf. exhibit catalog here), which opened yesterday in London's Royal Academy of Arts.

Of interest is the factoid that he exhibited seven pastels at the first Impressionist exhibit (Paris) in 1874. There are 20 pastels at the current exhibit, some of which are rather large. I am curious how they are framed. Are they in their original frames? Glass or plexi (if re-framed)? Katherine, any chance you have seen them?

The London duration of exhibit is 17 March - 10 June, 2007. Then the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts will have the old boys' art from 23 June - 16 September, 2007.

Kitty Wallis of Portland, Oregon does some fabulous water lily pastels that remind me of Monet.

Paper Choice

Gestural Detail: Abstract Reds Over Blues
Soft Pastel
Casey Klahn
Collection The Artist

The work on my easel now, The Bunkhouse, is being done on Townsend Pastel Paper. This choice I make based on my prior experience with that support. I want to over-work the colors and put down layers above layers ad infinitum.

Diane says that her daughter collaborates with her to produce this line of hand coated pastel paper. It is Rives BFK that has been hand coated with silicas, adhesive and other things that create a fine sanded surface. It doesn't take as much abuse as Wallis, but more than La Carte. It doesn't mind water, though. The Sennelier La Carte can be ruined by a drop of saliva, a random water spot or any floating drop of liquid spray that lands on it. There are repair methods for this tragedy, but if you want to tone your own paper you want something like TPP or Wallis.

My abstract that I posted here, I did on TPP paper. Because the paper likes to be rubbed and buffed, scraped and smeared. A favorite technique is to lay down a color, and then take it mostly off by rubbing with a chamois cloth, or a tissue paper. Try it with a kneaded eraser, too. If you over-apply pastel, and you need more re-working than simple fixative can provide, brush on some PVC diluted with water. Keep on working over the top of this patch, as if you had fresh paper.

As I work on The Bunkhouse, I notice that the Townsend paper is very good at accepting finger smears, and will accept just about any type of mark I want to make. I think I'm experiencing a breakthrough with it that I have been trying to achieve for some time, now. Looks like I'd better check the piggy bank, and order some new sheets.