An Inspiration for Making “A”rt With Pastels
I have been asked by MAPS to explain why I love
working with pastel and what inspires me as an artist, but these are not one
sentence answers. I am not sure what motivates most artists, but what has
motivated me for most of my adult life after art school was simply drawing my
booty off to support myself. I was a portrait machine. I made most of my income
as a street artist, drawing 5 minute profiles in pastel, which explains my
comfort with the medium. I averaged 100
or more faces on a good day when I was younger. I also worked from photos drawing
pets that I thought would please my clients. Regardless of my degree and
earlier ambitions this was all that I did. I only worked for extrinsic rewards.
I didn’t draw often outside of work primarily because
many of my 1980s art professors were highly convincing that the only art worthy
of hanging in public was non-objective work. I liked realism. I was harshly ridiculed
for wanting to draw like a realist in school by both professors and fellow
students. It was so humiliating. Realism was dead they explained. As a result of
these experiences I hid all of my future studio work in bulging portfolios tucked
away in the back of the garage. I know that sounds horrible but before you go
and judge me let me explain a few things first. You need to bear with me for a few more
paragraphs before you can understand why I am now motivated much differently.
First let me answer the easier question about
why I love pastel. I adore the feel of the dust on my fingers and the way that
the medium moves over the tooth of the paper. It never “dries” so you can come
back to it any time you want. I also
think that working with pure pigment without the hassle of a brush getting in
the way is great fun. A judge told me once that
another good motivation to focus on pastel is that there are not nearly as many
pastel artists showing in art festivals as there are artists working in oil,
acrylic or watercolor. That was good to know. Even if my work was lousy I had a
better chance of getting into shows someday. Cool!
My artistic motivation is a much more
complicated issue. A few years ago I
started searching for some sort of inspiration to create work that had some
deeper meaning for me other than just a making a copy of a person’s face. I was nearing 50 and had never entered a
single competition or did one fine art fair. I began spending hours reading and
studying other artists in between my craft classes that I was teaching at that
time. I drew every day. I even sent up prayers asking for signs to aim me
in the right direction but all I could do is draw what I thought people wanted
to buy since that is all that I had ever done. I was just a robot, or at least that’s how I felt.
I was very confused and had hit rock bottom art-esteem.
One day as I was crying into my coffee over my
frustration I remembered that when I was a kid I used put on headphones and doodle
to music to ease my teen anxieties. I came from a musical family and studied
classical music as a kid, so music always whisked me away to a better place. When I combined music with drawing it was
almost magical. I didn’t care about the end product back then, I just needed to
stay calm and it worked. I would fill
pages with swirls, squiggles and patterns wrapped around cartoonish looking
faces and floating eyeballs. (Today they call this “Zentangle”, which I find
highly amusing.) I think I forgot about
this experience over the years, but it suddenly came back to me. So, desperate
for any form of relief from my mid-life anxieties, I put on headphones and just
let it go. The experience was highly meditative. I had absolutely no ambition
to please anyone. It felt so good. My technical muscles were still flexing out
of habit, but the music took over and I just drew how the music made me
feel. It was not a portrait of my kid,
but more of an auto-biography. It was better than meditation and far cheaper
than a shrink. Heck, it was even better than alcohol!
I created many drawings after that based on
music, choosing of course the medium that I was most familiar with, which is
pastel. Perhaps a better description
would be that the drawings chose me and began to flow and ooze out of my head. Eventually
I became more concerned with research, pre-drawings and all that boring but necessary
stuff that realists are required to do, but the most important change was that
I stopped trying so hard to please the world. For the first time as an adult I was drawing
for myself and only for myself. I didn’t
really care how anything turned out because I was not working for clients. My pastel work became an auto- biography of my
own grief and about how music calms me. I
entered in competitions and shows to keep me on my toes, but I never expected
to actually win anything. Oddly enough
galleries and judges started to notice me. I am still astonished when I get an
award.
I soon realized that by combining tight photo
realism with pattern brings the viewer into a deeper state of consciousness,
just as listening to music brings me into a deeper meditative state. The pattern
that twists about the figure represents the music. If folks don’t get it, eh,
oh well.
My advice to other artists and my students, (I
teach fine art now instead of crafting), is to just stop caring what the world
thinks and draw what you love and work however you want. If you are required to
make art for your living as I still am, set some studio time aside for
yourself. Use the materials that make you happy and start having fun with what
you are creating instead of thinking about the extrinsic rewards. Your work
will glow with your own spiritual energy if you work for intrinsic reasons.
That is the truest motivation of all.
P.S. After writing this I was about to send it
off for the newsletter when I received notification that I have been
juried into the very prestigious International Guild of Realism. Ha!
Take that art school professors!
Happy pastelling!
Emily Christoff - Flowers
