Archive for May, 2010

Pastels from Wolf Kahn Weekend

Just a few works I did during the Wolf Kahn pastel workshop I attended last weekend. On Saturday we worked outside, and I admit I wanted to create a Wolf Kahn look alike with bold colors and simplified shapes. But choosing those colors and shapes is more challenging than it looks. So I stuck with a more representational style. On Sunday, we worked indoors since it was raining all day. I found the medium of pastel very frustrating. everything I did looked blurry and rough. Getting sharp edges required going over and over the work. But who ever said art was easy?

Drawing Mary

More figure drawing from Frederick. It seems that I am settling on a technique that I can apply to future figure drawing. For the quick 5-minute poses, like the one on the right, I use an ink pen. Using ink forces you to think fast, since every mark you make is permanent and cannot be erased. Then for the long hour poses, like the one on the left, I use a graphite or charcoal pencil and use a lot of cross hatching to build up the shadow areas. Cross hatching is slow but allows you to change your mind as you work. It is a little bit like sculpting, I think, chipping away at the paper, until the form is revealed.

Channeling Wolf Kahn

I am practicing with pastels lately, getting ready for a workshop with Wolf Kahn. He is a well-known American landscape painter that pioneered the melding of color field, abstract expressionism and impressionist landscape painting. He excels in using intense, seemingly unnatural colors, that perfectly express the light and weather effects of his subject matter. This weekend he is holding a workshop in pastel at the Yellow Barn Studio and, so to be prepared, I have done a few works of which this is the best example. Since you can’t mix pastels very easily you have to have a good selection of colors. Here I am using Sennelier pastels on a very rough white paper. This forces you to work on broad generalizations and not sweat the details. I like how this work conveys a sense of mysterious deep space behind the shed. The color of the inside of the door is different then the outside which looks a bit strange when the door is open but makes for a more interesting work.