sharing my secrets

Last Thursday evening I taught an adult oil pastel class. This was a first for me  -  not a first for teaching but a first time demonstrating and directly sharing any information about my personal techniques using oil pastel crayons. There were 10 "students" as well as an artist friend visiting from Ireland.  I began with a brief talk upstairs in the gallery and then we moved to the lower level for the messy stuff. I was quite surprised when more than half of these people opted to use surgical gloves. I hate having something get between me and a direct art experience but evidently most people prefer clean hands at the end of a 2 hour work session.

Anybody who has used or attempted to use oil pastels has quickly learned they are tricky and can be very frustrating to control. As mentioned in an earlier posting, I never knew that when I first used them in 1968 or when I reintroduced myself to their brilliant colors in January 1980. Ignorance really was bliss in my case. I had these very nice adults trying to figure out how to control the material and purposely kept getting them more and more confused. Better to have no illusions that I was going to be able to wipe away all their prior apprehensions about this medium!! It IS tricky and very idiosyncratic in comparison to other drawing materials. But in my mind the rewards are far greater for anyone willing to invest the necessary time to understand what can and can't be done and in what order or on what surface.

I always judge the success of my teaching ability by how often people laugh. A crowd of frowns is not a happy sight and fortunately the frowns only lasted about 10 minutes. But after that everybody realized I had been outlining worst case scenarios for them to experience before attempting something more positive. In the end everybody figured a way to manage the materials in a way they could complete a "picture"  -  which was evidently more than any had previously done. No crayons were thrown across the room or dumped into the trash. But the most interesting thing for me was simply watching each individual push through confusion to a point where a lightbulb lit over their heads and they settled into enjoyment of their own experiementation. Several people asked if I would teach another class and, if so, where so the end must indeed have justified the means!