"COMING STORM" 
     12" x 18"   pastel on Wallis Museum paper
                   by Lindy Cook Severns     

Pastel, an ancient painting medium is pure pigment pressed together with a minimal dose of clay binder. Brilliant dust particles compressed into stick form.  It's dirty work, almost like fingerpainting. I love it. And this purity means the collector doesn't have to worry about a pastel painting fading, yellowing or darkening. Professionally framed, a pastel painting will retain its original rich color for centuries.
 Optimistic that my own pastels will live long after I'm dust, I use an archival pastel surface. Wallis Museum grade "paper" doesn't share many characteristics with ordinary paper. It 's more like grit-embedded canvas. The toothy sanded surface holds up to 25 or 30 layers of buttery pastel. Because my surface holds the pigment in such a death grip, I don't spray fixative. I want the color I apply to be the color you and I see. I rarely do a detailed drawing underneath--I'm impatient by nature. I think in terms of blocks of color and value, which I underpaint in using hard pastels with turpentine or alcohol (rubbing, not Scotch) or I use faint watercolor pencil washes. And except for skies, I layer rather than blending. Skies are a different animal. Doing a sky means abrading my fingertips until they are raw and bleeding. (I've tried all sorts of blending tools. Nothing works like tender, unprotected fingertips. Primal joy in creating, bleeding for your art and all that.)
 I beat each finished painting on its floppy backside. If any pigment flakes off, better for it to happen on my watch. It rarely happens. Wallis paper is good stuff.
 Careful not to smudge my tender, unprotected painting, I make tracks for Kiowa Gallery in Alpine, TX. With a touch of pride and a sigh of relief at saying goodbye, I lay my newest creation on the counter, then let gallery owner Keri Artzt choose the right frame to display those rich, pure colors. And so a pastel painting is born.

For more about artist Lindy Severns, her pastel technique & materials and all that goes into one of her paintings, read her in-depth interview with Smartflix.com in their August 17 2007 blog archives.

subscribe to Wanderings of An Artist in Far West Texas. Lindy's blog shares insights into technique and the why's and where's of her pastels, as well as stories about life in the vanishing western wilderness.


How I did  Sierra del Carmen Light  :   Watch A Pastel Painting Come to Life

A winter trip back to Big Bend National Park inspired this 24" x 36" painting of the Sierra del Carmens from the desert floor.  I'm awed by the lushness of the Chihuahuan Desert. And, its vastness. Hence the large canvas.

First, I divide my canvas into quarters, then also into thirds. As I sketch, I note which elements of my subject fall into each of these zones.  Here, I work from a photo Jim and I took.  (I rarely use anyone else's photos.)  A few rapid, judicious strokes with Conte pastel pencils place the main objects in this landscape.  

As I sketch, I think What am I trying to say in this painting? How do I want the viewer's attention to flow through this landscape?

Quick scribbles indicate Spanish daggers, lechiguilla, distant mountains. Clouds and creosote bushes.  If I can't do this is ten minutes or so, there is a flaw in my composition and I need to start over.  This one clicked. 
Now, I paint the sky. The sky dictates the shadows, colors and mood of any piece. I use both the broad side and the tip of pastel sticks to get the color on. Then, I blend select areas. I'll return later to add highlights, darks, silver linings. But I need a strong sense of sky before I develop the ground below.


The vibrant del Carmen range in the distance must relate in color and value to my sky and to the soon-to-be-busy foreground.  So I put the mountains in with more detail than I might if this scene was more homogeneous. I follow the terrain as if I'm mapping the mountains.  It's tempting here to add too much detail. 

I continually step back, analyzing.  (The poor dog is in the studio with me.  I step on her tail, repeatedly.

Soon, I have a feel for the mountains.  So I skip into the foreground to define my darkest darks.  I don't care as much about local color  here (ie. grass is green) but warms (reds and yellows) and cools (blues and violets). This lets shadowy depths come forward or recede into my painting, respectively, creating a rhythmic dance for the eye.  Here shape is more important to me than line, value and temperature more important than hue. I want the viewer to feel the painting, not just see it.

I use the broad side of a dark red pastel to suggest the path I want the viewer's eye to travel into the landscape.  This ugly underpainting builds a dark, earthen base for the pale, stony ground between the Spanish daggers I'll add later.  I echo the blues of the sky and mountains into the bottom corner.  Because light is color. Light reflects in color.


Finally, I can afford detail. Using the zig-zagged flow I've suggested by clouds and foreground shadows , I add lights.  Little in the daytime desert is cool, so my lights are pale reds, oranges and yellows sprinkled with yellow-greens.  I don't use photo references for this. I do this intuitively:  I smell the desert, feel its heat. 

This is where my painting stops being a rendering and becomes art.

Defining the mass of Spanish daggers and lechiguilla in the foreground refines my darks.  I put in slender dagger spines, draw the tall skinny ocotillo in the center.  I knew where these plants were before I started painting, so now I'm actually coloring negative spaces I massed in earlier. Only now do I place greens in the foliage. I'm happy with this. It's coming along.

Now for the tedious part!  I must grow plants in the desert, sprinkle the earth with stones, tell clouds to cast shadows. But this lively painting, entering its adolescence, wants to go its own way.  Even though it can't support itself yet.  I must add strokes or it will starve. But too many strokes and I'll strangle the life from it.  So I tread gently now.


Detailing the foreground and middle ground requires as much time as I've already put into this painting.  I want identifiable foliage with variation in my greens. (Among the mysteries of the desert, how can seemingly barren ground support so many shades of green?)  To craft accurate shadows, I think about light. A lot. 

Constantly now, I measure colors against each other. Random splashes of color I've stroked across white canvas as I go pay off now as I develop foreground.  No single color clainms the earth.  (Had I been using oils, I would've cleaned my brushes across blank patches of foreground to get the same broken colors.  Using pastels, I must remember to sprinkle color to build upon later.)

I like the sloping drainage suggested by the fingering shadows of the creosote bush in the corner. I expand on that unplanned theme by placing rocks with highlights and shadows.  Now the zig-zagged composition carries me through the painting, into the mountains. Intense light, typical of the southwest, bakes the earth. It is the light that called me to paint this. So I now mentally title it "Sierra del Carmen Light".

across the invisible Rio Grande, the mystical Sierra del Carmens beckon.  I find myself wanting to hike the faint draw I've created.  I feel the sun, baking my face.  I imagine myself picking my way across uneven hardpack, wobbling on stones, dodging spines.  I hear my own footsteps slapping the desert's profound silence.  I sweat as I walk.   Soon, I'm relishing each cool, if intermittent ribbon of shade.   Mountains glimmer in the heat.  Rain-heavy clouds tease.  I wonder when the ocotillo in the center will bloom, if the saber-tipped lechiguilla lurking beneath the daggers will stab a careless hiker.  Like a strong fictional character, my painting has assumed a life of its own.  Now it has legs.

I present SIERRA DEL CARMEN LIGHT, a 24" x 36" pastel by Lindy Cook Severns:

I can do no more.  Not without transforming this elusive world of pigments into a different one.  Perhaps it would be a better world.  Perhaps not.  Regardless, I like this one.  My feet have been here before, and traveling through this painting feels true.

          

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