Jean Newburg
This summer I have been expressing myself in pastels. I am drawn to them for the intense color, something difficult to achieve using watercolor. Sunsets have been my inspiration, and I’ve been saving photos for a year, many from the Hudson Valley page in Facebook. The image of TRAILING was taken by me this February on Longboat Key in Florida. I brought them to Christie Scheele’s Landscape Painting Intensive workshop in June where I started and later completed 4 pastel paintings.
Pastel is relegated to summer for me, when I turn my porch into a studio, and can shake the dust into the garden, and keep washing my hands in the adjacent bathroom. It’s very dirty work! Last winter I tried working indoors but had to cover everything with plastic.
I know that I am also drawn to the immediacy of using pastels. No tools are required other than my hands. It’s a primal response, and I love to put my hands in clay in the sculpture studio, in earth in the garden, and now pastel on toothed and colored paper. With pastel there is no mixing of colors, so many sticks are required, and the softest ones are heavenly to use. And I will try velour paper as well.