Mini Collegiate

Pastel on Paper, 2013

Mini Collegiate Peak near Buena Vista, CO

Mantra

Yes. It is.

Sand Dunes

The pastel class I'm taking has gotten me inspired for landscapes. The instructor is a landscape artist and has lots of wonderful points and feedback about rendering landscapes that has been extremely helpful in trying to get things on paper. This is my first attempt at sanded paper, and I learned a lot in the process.

I took several photos of the painting above, but am not totally satisfied with how it came out. I feel that the purples in shadows of the dunes in the actual painting are more rich and vibrant, and look a bit washed out in the photo. I'm very pleased with how the foreground came out on the original, and since I worked mostly from top to bottom (a necessity with the sanded paper since the powdery residue of the pastels is pretty extreme and it needs to be worked from the top down upright on an easel in order to avoid contamination), by style and approach came together better in the foreground.

The flat-out best advice the instructor has imparted so far is the reminder that as an artist, I have artistic license in the rendering of anything. Working from my own photographs, she says, enables me to imbue the art with my own memory of color, feel, distance, depth, wind, light, stillness, sound, and ultimately, presence. Hearing this opened up all my feelings about landscapes: the thousands of photos I've taken of land – mountains, trees, sky, prairie, snow, water – are suddenly a stand-in for the memory, instead of being limited as merely the mediocre photographs I've always taken them to be.

Kandinsky

A little Kandinsky on a Tuesday morning...

Reception

I just got home from my first opening reception. It was fun, but I learned a lot! (No. 1: Get a babysitter for the kids, because even though I want them to be aware and involved, they had no interest in this. No. 2: Get a babysitter for the kids because I didn't get to stay and hobnob for very long. It would have been great to meet more of the local artists!) Most of the art was quite well done, the rest was interesting, and I got a lot of wonderful compliments.

And- that's my drawing on the poster. So I got a lot of publicity, too.

And now I feel like I have a lot to live up to, so I need to get to work on more art!