And now for something completely different!  I was in the studio on Wednesday with extra time and decided to work with a photo from the beach in Oregon. I had a mounted sheet of 18 x 24 white Wallis.  There was almost no detail in the photo–shape-wise. All amorphous fog lifting with some beautiful pieces of sky behind. I decided to just lay in some hard pastels in blues and aquas and do a dry underpainting with my hand. However, it was so much fun that I just kept on going!  Last Saturday I was at the demonstration by John Held at my gallery in Bethesda. Some of you know John, or will have seen his work in my book. John works completely out of his head, putting down pastel and seeing where that takes him.  And he smooshes it all!  I have always taught my classes not to use their hands in order not to kill the pastel. However, I can see that for clouds and sky it can be a really useful technique.

Compare this painting to the one of the Newport light house. In that painting, I put in a solid layer of hard pastel, then used soft pastels on top with no finger blending. Given the strokes and rough nature of the bottom of the picture, I think this works well. However, in this picture, the bottom is also blended. However, I did this with pastels and very little finger interaction.

I broke two of my own rules doing this painting: not to use my hands too much and not to work directly on white. And it worked just fine!  But it’s not the look that I want to create on a regular basis.  However, after the tedious detail of the house and hydrangea picture, this freely-applied pastel was really fun!  And the visitors to my studio at last night’s opening really liked it as well. I thought it needed some gulls, but two men agreed that that would make it trite and that I should leave them out. Fine with me!

Morning Fog, 24 x 18, Wallis Museum grade