Sometimes I just need a break from hauling all the oil paints around. I paint plein air and that means on location, painting the light and atmosphere. This sometimes means hauling it all in a serious backpack on my back when I need to hike a distance. I also paint with pastels plein air, but they are easier to carry, even though I still need my easel and umbrella. They are also more direct. You can only mix colors on the paper itself, so you bypass the palette mixing. I use professional soft pastels (Unison, Sennelier) on archival sanded paper.
I approach pastels the same way as my paintings, as a colorist laying down large blocks of the color of light and shadow, making sure I have the values and color temperatures correct. Then I start breaking up the large blocks with the more subtle changes of color. I try to capture the "envelope" of light, which means the feeling of the atmosphere and type of light.
All three of these were done in the summer. The top was done from Rocky Knob, a bald on the Blue Ridge Parkway, which I had to hike a short distance to. Spectacular. It is kept bald by grazing cows who are part of the trail experience. This was an evening pastel painting, so the color is a warmer yellow than the one below to the left, which was hot partly cloudy summer day at a pond in the valley. The one on the lower right, also from the Blue Ridge Parkway overlooking Cahas Mountain, was an overcast day, which causes the ground to appear darker relative to the sky. We had recently endured an epic heat wave, so I escaped to this elevated site and actually needed my sweatshirt. While I painted a mother and daughter drove up, sat on the grass and read. What a peaceful place to read a book. We stayed for a couple hours until it started to rain. I hope that the painting has the feeling of "about to rain". The land becomes darker as the sky gets lighter...unless a big blue-grey thunderhead appears. I heard another plein air artist say once, "On an overcast day the sky is much lighter than the ground. If the sky appears darker than the ground, you better get the heck out of there as fast as you can." On an earlier painting outing on Rocky Knob, my husband and I hiked, set up and then heard thunder and the sky darkened on this high elevation bald. Although we tried to deny the approaching storm, once we saw the cows heading down, I told my husband, "Come on! We've got to be at least as smart as cows. Let's get outtahere."
If you are interested in purchasing pastel paintings, please keep in mind that they need special framing that involves a spacer, double mat with the inside reverse cut and glass. There are several sites on the web that explain how to do it, but one of my favorite is this site because of the cutaway drawings. They also sell the spacers on this site:
http://www.frametek.com/HTML/Articles/pastel.html
All of the above are professional soft pastels (the finest pigments) on archival sanded paper, 11" x 14", except the top one, which is 10" x 14". Click on my Daily Paintworks icon on the top right to order them.
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