Pastel Landscape #3 and #4

24" x 18"

oil pastel on paper

A red maple is bracketed by two slanting birches made of gray paper and white highlights. The dynamic, spontaneous brushwork of my large Abstract Expressionist paintings done ten years ago find new life in a different medium, scale, and subject. Working in the former manner gave me an awareness of the picture independent of the subject, the thing the viewer is going to see. Vigor can be deadened when the artist becomes enslaved by the subject, feeling a sense of loyalty to do it justice. The artist's feet become stuck in cement. Abstract painting can be lifeless too, shapes without soul. It doesn't have to do with how "finished", refined, or detailed a picture is; it is the vitality and passion, quiet or loud, that makes a picture go.

Chardin (1699-1779) a representational painter with a tender eye, quiet and sensitive to seeing, known especially for still life and scenes of daily life. Pollock literally poured his angst and energy into his pictures, qualities missing from wanna-be's. He was very focused, something that escapes people who dismiss the splatters as out of control. It is always sad to me when art is misunderstood. Maybe that is why I write about mine.

Pastel Summer Landscape #1 and #2

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.