Original artwork description:

“A well spent day brings happy sleep.” — Leonardo da Vinci

I really enjoy the freedom working with soft pastels brings. Their very nature, ie a blunt stick, dictates that you should use them as such, so I make sure that I work standing at the easel, stepping back frequently to ensure that I keep the liveliness of the lines interesting, and not getting too precious about any attempts at ‘perfection’ of the form.

If I find myself tightening up too much, I can always take a look at some Degas drawings and get some reinvigorated ‘loose’ incentive.

Having said that, it should be noted that Degas himself was a somewhat of a perfectionist (and a draftsman of the highest order), and spent hours and days reworking his pastels. One of his models, Pauline recalled how he would ‘retrace his drawing and copy the same thing on to many sheets of pastel paper. Then he painted his subject in different hues, endlessly varying the colours, until one of the pastels satisfied him enough to complete it…’

Degas once remarked – ‘I assure you no art was ever less spontaneous than mine.’

Despite this however, he managed to keep the pastels looking remarkably fresh and spontaneous, as opposed to a number of his contemporary copycat wannabes who overworked their lines and basically ‘licked’ the drawing to a chocolate box lid death!

By keeping it loose, Edgar was able to keep the drawing as an entity in itself rather than just a representation of the subject matter. As he mused, ‘A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy’, which is actually not dissimilar to slumber. This pastel is sold unframed and rolled in a tube. It has been fixed from smudging with hairspray, but will need to be put under glass in a frame like all pastels to protect it over time.

Materials used:

pastel

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