Oil Pastels: Further Experiments, and a Temporary Refuge

View toward Palermo, from Segesta. Oil pastel on paper, 12" x 8.5".

This is a picture I started last week. Yesterday I worked on it quite a bit more, and am ready to call it finished. 

 

I'm finding oil pastel to be a strange medium and hard to get used to, but I rather like how it fits somewhere between painting and drawing. The technique is more like drawing, but the result more like painting. These details are a little larger than life-size, so you can see how the creamy, crayon-like pigment functions quite a lot like artist's oil paint. It sits up on the surface, can be applied quite thickly, but also blended with a finger or a rolled paper stomp. You can scratch through it to reveal lower layers, or rough it up with a contrasting color, applied quite lightly and dryly.

These days, I find the news has required concentration on something else, a different world of values, especially for us up in Canada. I must say, I'm not one for being very nationalistic (a common trait up here) but there's nothing like being insulted and threatened to bring us together. Listening to male bullies also makes me want to find refuge in something that's flexible, pliant, under my own control, and has a chance at being beautiful and reflective of a better world.

Comments

[Kathy Hughes]

Beautiful painting and words Beth - these are very discouraging times. Hope other than that you and J. are well.
xxoo

[Natalie]

I particularly like the luscious line of trees at the bottom.

Wholly agee with your sentiments re the world stage. If I were to make a list of everything that's hair-tearingly tooth-gnashingly mind-blowingly wrong nowadays and another one of everything that's upliftingly right, I know which would be the longer one! In my view anyway.

[Priya]

This looks very good. The thing with painting with a blunt medium is that it refuses to let you go into detail. That is a challenge I love. How well you've interpreted the landscape here simply by placing paint and building it up. It is a pleasure to look at.