The name game
Two pastel artists explain why they stick with the medium
What do you call a piece of art made with a pastel stick? Is it a drawing or a painting?
I asked Clarence Porter and Aleda O’Connor. Both work with sticks made from powdered colour pigment and a binder.
“I call them paintings,” Porter says. “Pastels have had a bit of a bad rap with galleries. My thinking as to why they are now being called paintings as opposed to drawings is that it gives them more of a sense of legitimacy.”
O’Connor also calls them paintings.
“I think of the finished pieces as paintings, although technically, the process more closely resembles drawing.”
Both artists are familiar with other mediums and materials. Porter has tackled “markers, inks, gouache, watercolour and acrylic paints, scratchboard and block cuts. And finally computer generated art. I’ve more recently worked with oil paints.”
O’Connor has painted with oil, watercolour and tempera, and drawn with charcoal, pen and ink.
Porter is well known for his landscapes and urban views. “The View Past the Pond” was inspired by a particular place.
“A good friend had a threeacre farm in Northumberland County, near Grafton. On the far side of the property, there was a pond, surrounded by phragmites.”
His style is loosely representational and colourful. The tall reeds fill the foreground. Porter envisions them as thin multicoloured vertical lines, each line comprising more than one colour. The reeds create a kind of momentary barrier before allowing us to reach the pond and the land beyond it. Pink, purple and orange dabs enliven the trees. Streaks of mauve break up the clouds.
Porter works on paper. Sometimes he makes his own surfaces.
“I apply a pastel ground or modelling paste to either Masonite or illustration board to give me a texture to work off.”
In “The Reaching, No. 1” a city street invites us in. The shadows of trees cast dark diagonals across the pavement and anticipate the trees on the left. Cars on the right offer contrasting shapes and textures. Dabs and an occasional scribble of bright pink link everything.
“What I like most about pastels is how immediate they are,” Porter says. “I can put my colours right down on the paper with no concerns about drying time, as with paints for instance. I can layer pastels over top of each other to get just the right hue, tint, shade, chroma.
“If I’m not happy with the results, I simply take a paint brush and brush off what I’m not happy with. I also love their intensity of colour.”
O’Connor, too, loves the “immediacy of this medium, there’s no mixing.”
She likes to work with oil pastels on wood panels.
“I have experimented with gessoed paper and canvas, but prefer the resistance that wood panels offer, and the texture of the wood grain.”
In “Night Mills, Hamilton,” big industrial buildings dominate the composition, contributing geometric shapes and straight lines.
“Driving into the city one sees the hulking shapes across the water during the day, but at night, darkness hides the grit and transforms them into something magical,” she says.
In “Spring Lawn” she takes a wider view and mutes her colours according to a season in which nature has not quite awakened. “Mark-making, linear strokes, rubbing and scratching are all part of my repertoire,” O’Connor says. “Sometimes I spray areas with solvent and scrape back, either with something sharp or with a pastel stick of a different colour.
“I blend colours by hatching various hues together, like weaving. Ultimately the surface builds up to create patches of colour.”