24" x 18"
oil pastel on paper
Pastels are very direct and have an immediate energy that is often different from painting. These have the rhythm of growing things. The dots convey the exuberance of perfect summer days and expectations of the harvest. Like watercolor and drawing in general, the paper showing through functions as connective tissue between all the elements of the picture, making harmony and adding to the presence of light. I like the planar aspects of the fields simultaneously perpendicular and parallel to the tree line.
Mary Cassatt (American 1844-1926) described the fabric and background of her chalk pastel, Mother Playing with Child, 1897. [www. MaryCassatt.org is a great site of her complete works.] The faces are more tightly rendered. Delacroix's 1850 pastel, Sunset, enjoys the horizontal colored bands of landscape. Degas' 1892 Landscape, monotype heightened with pastel, is soft, focusing on the atmosphere of a scene from a distance almost from the point of view of a hot air balloon. My pastels are bolder, more visceral. Cassatt liked to repeatedly return to a subject in an effort to make a picture very deliberate even whilst conveying movement. I will take her advice back to the drawing board, not because the works made are deficient, but to continue the quest.
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