Rapture and Serenity

'Rapture & Serenity' 11x13" Soft Pastels on Wallis Museum Grade Paper

Early one evening my darling and I took supper on the patio. As we finished I took note of the fringe of white fire that the late day sun was striking in the edges of the Sieryu maple. The Buddleia was still in bloom, and despite the contrast, her purpleness, and some lovely orangey glow was twinkling in her canopy. I ran for the camera and after snagging some shots, I continued to study the scene for the few minutes that it continued.
As you might expect, the photo darks were very dark, near black, but I knew they were not quite as inky as they appeared. There was a ‘smokiness’ to those darks in the real garden. As I prepared to paint I considered two conflicting strings of painterly advice I had picked up:

• “Students go too dark too soon. It’s a common problem.”
• “In pastels, if you don’t get your darks ‘dark enough’ early, there’s really no going back to fix it late in the game.”

Hmm. Definitely some serious darks here, and some serious brights. I decide to set the darks at absolute and layer in lighter values of color as needed for texture until I found that ‘smokiness’, whatever that was. It went slowly for me. Long periods of looking and thinking between small bits of painting. I tried a blue in the darks to push them back…but ouch! It was all wrong. Broke the warmth of the scene. In brushing it off, I found my way back in. The brushed out areas left a dark haze, but some tint of light was shining through from the white paper. There was that suggestion of smoke! I do love how the process of painting can be a continual puzzling out of problems, approaches, fixes, and yes, that sweet rush when some little thing works.

March 2011
I renamed this piece and post 'Rapture and Serenity' after cropping it hard on the left and studying it some more. I just couldn't escape the sensation of 'standing in the presence of God.' Here it is cropped and framed for printing on greeting card stock.

Earliest Work 1

As this blog will also become my own retrospective reference, I wanted to catch up on posting some early work. There is precious little of it, actually, so it won’t take long. Setting up for the photos and reclaiming images from frames I had hoped to never move is the toughest part!

Last Spring 2008 I attended some group art lessons under the eye of Pastel and Oil Painter, Rick Rennick here in town. Shown here is the second piece I ever painted. Beginners luck! It is a copy of an Alan Bloom garden photo from a spring 2008 issue of Garden Design magazine. I wanted an image that would make me learn how to get different shaped marks from my pastels, and how to get the darks really dark. (This photo is darker than reality, the victim of inadequate studio lighting and a poorly balanced monitor for digital color adjustment.) Rick likes working pastels on sued mat, so that’s what I have been using so far. Its advantages are in being nearly dustless, easy to carry around, and needing only the faintest of fixative sprays to hold the final layers still.

I was terrified to begin this painting. Because I was literally copying a photo, I rendered from top to bottom, left to right, so the image was 90% finished as I moved across the page. This did help boost my confidence to keep going, so maybe it was a good thing to copy a photo after all!  I realize now that this was a work flow not suited to actual painting. Still, I was quite pleased with the result. It’s a bit stylized, which was a surprise to me. Resembles embroidery perhaps, but I had fun and am not embarrassed to have it seen. Since it cannot be shown or sold, it lives on the foyer table under a lamp.