Gallery Seven – Pastel Landscape and Still Life

Behind the playing fields, Peace Garden and picnic grounds, Sebastopol’s Ragle Park opens to a grand field, poppies and many more wildflowers above a marshland and blackberry tunneled trails. Atascadero creek below meanders near the park’s lower boundary.

 

Shifting light calls attention to color and texture, first poppies, now lupine as some wildflowers close up and vanish in clouds and dusk.

What I’m aiming for are moments of strong sensation ⎯ moments of total physical experience of the landscape, when weather just reaches out and sucks you in. And the challenge of trying to trigger those moments with pigments of ground-up earth. When you think about it, it’s really very mysterious.
– Jane Wilson, 1991

PASTEL INFLUENCES IN MY LIFE

What came first . . . drawing, drawing, drawing, crayons, going outside the lines in coloring books where there was room to play with color. I always loved mark making, and navigating the shapes of spaces between and around objects. Pastels were a natural transition. My Skidmore College teacher, Arnold Bittleman, an extraordinary mark maker and pastelist, introduced us to Impressionists and Postimpressionists who painted in pastel as well as oil, including Edgar Degas, Odilon Redon, and Toulouse Lautrec. I later discovered Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Pierre Bonnard, Jane Wilson, and Wolf Kahn, contemporary Impressionist/Realist/Abstract Impressionist/Color Field painter, with whom I was fortunate to study for an intensive month of daily plein air painting in New Mexico.

Taking back roads to Occidental, I was smitten with a hillside of wildflowers and waving grasses, changing colors and shapes in the wind, like rising and falling music.

Sitting in the wind amongst blackberry bushes invited a second more gestural response to the lively spring hillside. It called for dance and video!

A mile hike to an overlook of Mendocino’s Big River distilled on the spot and in memory in the studio to this shimmering many layered pastel.

A small Pepperwood Preserve pond that holds reflections of Mt. St. Helena, oak woodlands, wildflower hills, spiky grasses, and more for the slowly moving viewer.

The pond behind me, I look up a hillside of wildflowers getting buried in seeding grasses, changing from greens to gold in this dry dry spring of California’s drought.

This small lake in the Adirondacks seems so modest, yet it is differently enticing, as am I, at every encounter.

A channel of water energy, carved through rocks, always evolving.

Each rock and its events of texture, lichen and plants, mineral origins, could be its own entire univserse.

We’ve canoed from here, upstream, with the tidal influence always challenging the journey. From above, a shimmering liquid ribbon bordered by dense woods, with edges that shimmer in water and against sky.

The Sonoma Coast’s ruggedness is a siren call and a caution. This pastel formed itself out of those elemental forces.

Gull watching me painting, Mendocino Headlands.

At Mendocino Headlands you can feel how the cliffs were folded and formed.

On the coast, in the quieting wind at day’s end, sea gulls rise up to form the next patterns.

Shadowed rocks against illuminated sea and sky.

A hidden away cove, gently entices at its entry, fiercely warns at its edges.

A demo for students at Pepperwood Preserve, as much to share the energy of the mark making, to hear the sounds of the drawing as they worked also, as for how to build a painting with oil pastel.

Blue on blue, ocean holding the last lights.

The edge of the world, just before all distinctions vanish in the mysterious deep and glowing colors of the night.

The table is empty, a space for the outer to meet the inner.

Remnants of the ranch that came before Sea Ranch.

The painter’s magic hour, when all is transformed from moment to moment, unlike the seeming stillness and flat volumes of midday. A time for both observation and invention.

From the Mendocino Art Center, the space between a leaning cypress and a Victorian house opens to ocean beyond. Window shapes make spaces for small abstract paintings.

I sit near cliff edges, awaiting moments of sudden illumination. What emerges on the page is a distillation of moments, and an invention, a response to an often fleeting rush of feeling and visual event.

Through the windows, the starkness of classroom life in this charming landmark contrasts with the gentle leafing out of its springtime gardens.

Across from Mendocino Art Center, I dream of what might take place in these studios . . . the camera would show them in their richly dark brown grey wood.

Come squeeze into an old school desk and take out a reader. . . your lesson is on the chalkboard and a fire in the potbelly stove. Outside, a bit mysterious. . . which I cultivate over the picturesque.

Perhaps sky and ocean in a shell, sand and cliffs rippling below. . .

Bobbing on a gentle sea, or emerging. . .

From the garden, or perhaps planetary. . .

I was invited to paint at the Spring plant sale and festival at the Occidental Art and Ecology Center. These giant heritage greens have my favorite magentas and purples and mark the entrance to the first greenhouse.