before and again

I had made small drawings as preparations for paintings before. I like using pastel when I work directly from a motif because it’s so easy to use. You open the box of pastels and begin drawing. There’s no mixing of paints (though you can blend sticks of color together on the page). And as the light changes, you find that you’ve spent most of the time actually describing the scene rather than pausing for cleaning a brush or refreshing the paint. Then the drawings are there to use to create a painting, and the painting is thus slightly removed from the actual objects and opens a passage for imagination. Or so it seems to me. Every artist has his own way of working that feels right.

I paint in different ways. The idea of creating fully realized drawings to then…