As an artist whose preferred medium is pastels it is not unusual to be given quizzical looks regarding my choice of medium. Why would anybody want to use pastels? Having exhibited with the Pastel Society on several occasions I remember that there is a kind of defensive air about these occasions …. something of a gesture of defiance to a generally uncomprehending world. Worse than that, I recall one occasion when I approached a gallery to enquire whether they might be interested in showing my work, and I became immediately aware that the proprietor was openly dismissive of anything I might like to offer without ever having seen a single piece of my work.* So: why pastels?
Actually, as in so many other parts of my life, the answer is that I drifted into it by accident. Just as I never set out to study sociology, nor to become an academic, and certainly never set out to become a specialist on the Balkans, I never actually made a decision to take up pastels. It was almost as if they chose me.
My earliest engagement with art with anything like serious intentions was as a student. I suppose partly for economic reasons I worked in charcoal. In fact, I still have two drawings I made then. During my year in Canada I remember doing my own Christmas card, also in that medium, although I designed a leaflet for Canadian CND using an ink drawing. It wasn’t until I returned to the UK that I encountered pastels. My late mother-in-law gave me a set for Christmas …. it must have been in 1965. It was a small boxed set, made by Rembrandt.** There is still, on one of my racks, a large urban landscape I did in Leicester, recently rediscovered in the loft of my first wife’s house. I can’t be sure why, but I took to the medium pretty well instantly.
Later, as my ambitions developed, I had a spell of working with oils, partly (I suspect) for the simple reason that I believed that “real” artists worked with oils. For some reason I’ve never really fathomed, I have not felt at home with them. Perhaps it is because I enjoy the tactile qualities of pastels, and feel excluded from intimate contact with the work when it is taking shape somewhere over there, at the end of a brush. A few of my experiments with oils survive, and I have exhibited some of them, but they never quite “took”, and I have never sold any of them.
Certainly I wouldn’t regard myself as a “stick-in-the-mud”. Let’s face it, during the past year I have finished pieces in several other media, most notably the Green Man set, for which I used water-colour pencils and gold leaf, but also the Wassail series, which I drew in ink. There is, however, a definite sense of my being “at home” with pastels. Thanks, Hilda, for that first set!
*Actually, I wouldn’t have wanted to show there, as I realised straight away that what he was showing was no more than expensive wallpaper.
**I still have the battered remains of them, and this brand is still my favourite, even ‘though I have a variety of others.