LIZ HAYWOODSULLIVAN
Dancing Light
For four-and-a-half years, Liz Haywood-Sullivan was president of the International Association of Pastel Societies where she managed three international conventions and 12 international exhibitions. After four-and-a-half years,
she is back in the studio painting. “It has been like a logjam,” she says. “All the things I’d seen—the work of other artists, articles, shows and other influences—had to come out. I had to stop thinking and paint what was flowing through me. I wanted to explore and push myself. Artists don’t like standing still.”
She discovered the pastel medium as a freshman at Rochester Institute of Technology where she took a figure drawing class once a week. Students tore
sheets from a roll of brown craft paper, picked up their charcoal and drew. “Partway through the year,” she relates, “we were given white chalk to work with. It was as if a light got turned on. Instead of the brown paper being the lightest value it became the mid-value and I could work from mid to dark and then to light. I fell in love.”
For 20 years, she worked in design but did take a pastel workshop. Today she is a recognized master of the medium.
Her latest work will be shown at Vose Galleries in Boston, September 28 through November 9. Dancing Light: Changing Seasons refers to the light she calls her muse and that whichever season she is in is her favorite—although winter may have an edge.
“I’m drawn to paintings that excite me when I walk into a room,” she says. “When I get up to normal viewing distance, they reveal something more. I lock my hands behind my back and practically put my nose in the painting. When I get that close, I want to see something of the soul of the artist. I want to see more of what the artist has revealed to me.”
That Special Evening is one of her own paintings that has that effect. Painting on dark paper, she uses the broad sides of her pastel sticks; it is a process of mark making. On white paper, she often begins by painting with a brush and pastel diluted with alcohol. That Special Evening is a sky study with a low horizon. Sunlight illumines the distant fields and blue sky breaks through the clouds. It is immediately arresting. Using her viewing position of putting your nose in the painting, elements of her technique emerge in fascinating abstractions. A bit of the black paper emerges beneath passages of pastel and fluid brushstrokes. “It’s not my intent to be photographic,” she explains. “I want to show how the paintings are constructed.”