Wet Pastel and Chasing Ghosts This Weekend

Sold-out workshop in Bloomington, IN was a BLAST

I just returned from a two-day workshop that I taught in Bloomington, IN in a great classroom, courtesy of Ivy Tech College. The non-profit, Artists for Climate Awareness (ACA) hosted me as the instructor for teaching wet pastel techniques. A portion of the workshop proceeds benefited both the ACA and the Sycamore Land Trust. Like the Indiana Waterways project, I once again used art to help the cause of conservation.

If any of you have been around pastel long, you know that the dry pigments can be washed with water and alcohol. But for the past four years I’ve been experimenting with many other liquids. Really, anything that is liquid may be used with pastel.

The class was limited to 12 but we added one from the waiting list to get to our lucky 13. I demo’d the same landscape composition with seven different mediums on seven different panels. Then we all began adding mediums by chasing the ghosts each left. By applying different liquids, the pastels react differently. Even water and alcohol look different after the application of them for under painting.

Underpainting — or washing in the large areas of color and value — typically are the reasons most artist add liquid to the dry medium. Mostly, they do this to block in the images early. However, a growing number of us pastelists are adding liquid to the early wash, but at different stages during the creation of the paintings.

We construct an image then destroy it with various types of liquids. When we destroy it, there are stains or what I call ghosts of the images left behind. After drying the liquid, we follow the outlines and blooms of color for the next application of dry pigments.

Then it is destroyed again, or only destroyed in places again and again until we artists are satisfied with the end results. I have destroyed a painting four or five times before it was no longer destroyed, but was reconstructed as I followed the ghosts left each time.

Bloomington has a large watercolor society and to my surprise a lot of the students in this class were watercolorists — they took to these techniques like a duck to water (excuse the cliche please). Remember the post a month ago where I said I sometimes learn more than the students? Watching watercolorists used these techniques gave me new ideas to try.

Pastel painting is often times very fast. I can complete some paintings with pastel within a couple of hours, if I don’t use wet mediums. But wet pastels slow the process down — some paintings may take a week to complete, depending how large they are, how long some of the liquids need to dry, and how many times I destroy them.

You might wonder, why Destroy them? After the addition of each liquid, then layer of dry pigments, the surface becomes textured and layers of pastel from each of the processes shows through. The surfaces of each of these paintings becomes very interesting and no other way is possible to create that kind of surface and layered color.

If you are afraid of ghosts or destruction, wet pastel isn’t for the faint of heart.

Photo: Ivy Tech’s art room provided the setting for a study of at least eight different mediums to use in wet pastel techniques. If you have an art association or organization that would like to schedule a workshop, email me….avonwaters@yahoo.com