Yesterday afternoon I had the opportunity to speak about my exhibition with a group of art students from Indiana University. First of all, I like talking with students. The hard part is quickly capturing their attention in such a way that I become "real" enough to them for genuine communication to take place. I have no idea whether or not these students enjoyed what I had to say but I certainly had fun speaking to them. In a formal setting it's a bit of a challenge to be chatty and conversational but that's how I approached the task. At one point I asked how many had tried to work with oil pastels in the past and maybe a dozen hands went up. Then I asked how many found the medium nearly impossible to manage and every hand stayed in the air!
The thing about this material I use is that it's really easy to make a mess and really difficult to control. Only I never knew that because I was never introduced to the frustration of using cray-pas crayons as a student. This seems to have been my great good fortune. I bought my first set of oil pastels in May 1968 shortly after arriving in London to work for TWA. I lived at Lancaster Gate directly opposite the Round Pond in Kensington Garden and thought it might be nice to have some sort of art materials to play around with nafter work and on weekends. Shortly after arriving I stopped into an art supply shop in Bayswater and the man suggested oil pastels because they were not messy and needed no fixative. I'd never heard of oil pastels but I bought a set of 36 Caran D'Ache neocolors and a sketch pad. I enjoyed being able to sketch while I was in London but when I returned to the US that September I promptly forgot about the crayons and went right back to painting with oils.
In January 1980 I was looking for a way to paint without any of the fumes or dust or fixatives that could trigger an asthma attack in my then 4 year old daughter. I had also figured out that with my limited time for painting I couldn't afford the 15 minutes of set up time and the 10 minutes of clean up time when I could only steal an hour here and there to work. Remembering the old set of oil pastels from England I thought I'd try to work with them in layers and see if there was some way to build up deep rich colors. I initially did "under painting" with colored pencils and applied oil pastels over the prismacolor pencils. The Caran D'Ache neocolors worked exactly the same 11 years later as when they were new. Eventually I bought oil pastels from other manufacturers and learned each had very different pigment densities and very different base compositions and had very diferent proerties when I wanted to combine them.
Through trial and error I learned how to layer these different brands of oil pastels and in the process developed the unique build up of surface textures that characterize my work. It wasn't at all unusual for my larger pieces to have more than 60 layers of color applied dry one color over another over another. For 25 years I resisted adding paint thinner to explore a more painterly experience. I really liked the unusual effects I was developing by working dry and loved the intimacy of my hands working directly on the paper. There were always small accidents when a finger nail got too close to the surface and scraped away several layers of color. I could never repair these scratches so decided to consider then "gifts" and figure out how to incorporate these unexpecgted gestural markings into the composition as positive elements.
At some point during the late autumn of 2008 my friend Billy Hertz convinced me to try using Turpenoid to liquify the oil pastels for underpainting and save myself the wear and tear of so much repetitive motion that wouldn't ever be visible in the finished pieces. Not only has this new aproach given me a very wonderful tool, it has really saved my shoulders hours and hours of repetitive motions. Now I wonder why I was so resistant for all those years when people used to ask if I ever used paint thinner with the oil pastels. I hadn't handled a paint brush since 1979 and with new bionic sholders I had to relearn how to manipulate a brush which was an interesting task all by itself. Now it seems perfectly natural for me to draw and then apply the turpenoid to make washes that create grounds and then either repeat that process or simply draw over the grounds..
Before they left yesterday I invited the students to attend the adult oil pastel class I'm teaching tomorow night. I hope some of them will attend. It's the first time I have given a specific demonstration of my working methods and techniques. After 30 years I figure it's OK to share some of my secrets.
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