Another Throwback Tuesday...or, The Girl in the Green Shirt.

22" x  15" Pastel on Paper

Here are a couple pastel portraits mentioned in an earlier post. Years ago I worked exclusively in dry media, such as graphite, charcoal and colored pencil. In the early 90's, wanting to make larger works and finding colored pencil unsuited for that, I switched from colored pencils to pastel. The pastel paintings were done on archival printmaking paper that had the right kind of  "tooth" for the kind of pastel painting I wanted to do. Pastel not only made larger works so much easier to do, but also improved value range and color saturation.

30" x  22" Pastel on Paper

Coincidentally, the model's family lived in the same neighborhood as a well-known painter named William Whitaker, and were friends with him. When the second painting shown in this post was accepted and hung in the Springville museum's Spring Salon, I was surprised to see it on the wall right beside a painting by the model's neighbor, William Whitaker.

Photographs by Hawkinson Photography.

Another Throwback Tuesday

Colored Pencil on Paper

This piece goes back to the '90s. I met the woman who modeled for this picture at (conveniently enough) an art supply store. It's a colored pencil piece on a full-sized sheet of archival printing paper, and one of the reasons I don't work in colored pencil anymore. That's a LOT of paper to cover using only tiny pencil points! I made a couple other paintings of her, but with pastel instead of colored pencil. Maybe I'll show those works in future "throwback" posts.

This portrait won a merit award for me in 1998 at the 74th Utah Spring Salon at the Springville Museum of Art, and was reproduced in the show catalog. I've neglected entering these kind of shows for a while now, in favor of painting for professional galleries. What museums like and what galleries want seem to be two different things. I've been considering getting active in museum shows again, while continuing to paint plein air landscapes for galleries, which I very much enjoy doing. The demands, opportunities and challenges that come with shows like The Spring Salon carry a different kind of excitement.

Photograph by Hawkinson Photography.