Your close and I cannot tell a lie...

Some artists call their pastel works paintings but I draw with pastels so for me they are drawings. When I was little, 14 or so, I copied a few da Vinci ink drawings, and I love the way he would shade by delicately slashing diagonal lines. Michelangelo does this similarly even on some of his fresco paintings. The Renaissance artists who painted with egg tempera also use delicate repetitive lines to tone or shade. Degas uses lots of large slashing lines in his pastel drawings, I guess that is what you mean by "impressionistic" but you could also be talking about the quality of color in shadows?

About Pencils there is very little blue in the piece...it’s a little hard to explain, but the pastel drawing is done on intense red paper...what you are seeing as blue hues are either pink, magenta, lime, and purple colors---it’s an optical thing. Orange pastel on red paper reads yellow; purple pastel on red reads blue; blue on red paper looks like neon!

Newberry

Hi George,

I cannot help but think that you are holding realism as the standard. And then, yes, I am not a strict realist. One of the things you seem to do is to is to compare one of my quick gestural pastel drawings with an image in your mind of another artist’s realistic painting. Is that so?

 When I am drawing in pastel I have a couple of things I am trying to accomplish:

1. Work as quickly as possible to capture the essence of the scene I am looking at, especially with daylight as I limit myself to 45 minute sessions as the light moves and changes everything. I would then come back the next day at the same time. Most of my pastel drawings are made within 45 minutes to 7 hours.
2. Most pastel artists blur and blend the colors to create a realistic effect, I like to keep the colors clean and develop the form and light by overlapping layers pure color.
3. Many realists start with a main focus like a window pane or the face, fully develop it, then move on to other things. Often you can see that they get the eyes first but then might leave the rest of the paper/canvas unfinished. I like to work first the whole composition, the big picture, blocking out large areas and then refine it as I develop the work.

In my studio I often have a few major works, oil paintings, on the burner. I will work on them for thousands of hours and some become quite realistic. Granted it is very difficult for a novice to know anything about the differences between types of drawings and paintings. Rembrandt made a oil sketch, perhaps a two or three-hour work, of a side of beef. Rand went ballistic about the content of this work and she dropped the context that distinguishes major works, such as the Danae which Rembrandt worked on for over 10 years, with something he made in the matter of one morning.

Michael

(Edited by Newberry on 11/28, 7:27am)

Hey George,

You’re not an antiques dealer are you? You have a kinda sophisticated taste with Turner, Hopper, and King.

George asked: "What is the dividing line between Realism, Impressionism and Abstract art? Or do you believe that it is greatly a subjective question?"

(Chuckle) No I don't think that the question is subjective. And I doubt I will give you definitive answers. This won’t help much but my dividing lines tend to be drawn not on styles but on what I think are the common denominators between great artists that lesser artists don't share. For example I see more similarities between Picasso and Michelangelo than I see between Michelangelo and contemporary classical realists or Picasso with many slapdash painters.

But I do think there is a dividing line between representational art (art with any recognizable subject no matter how fragmented or obscure) and abstract art (no recognizable subject).  Representational artists use paint as a means to create their subject and abstract artists use paint as the end, paint for paint’s sake.

A brilliant scarlet slash of paint on the bridge of sitter’s nose in a Rembrandt painting is serving many purposes:

1. That color by its interrelationships with all the other colors of the face will give the face a living quality.

2. That color is also vibrating precisely in space and following and completing the form of the face.

3. That color along with all the others in a Rembrandt painting is integrated to create the experience of seeing light.

4. And the color can be beautiful in itself but only so much as it solves all the other problems.

With a Pollock, color represents its self; it also represents a frozen form of action, dripping. He may or may not be interested the color vibrations in themselves and to each other but it is hard to know.

Personally, I love the conceptual leap of transforming color to create people, places, things, environments. Abstract art for me is way too concrete bound and my brain would atrophy from boredom.

Michael