This past weekend, the Pastel Society of New Mexico invited me to the Albuquerque Museum to give a painting demonstration. My theme was "Understanding Value: Painting Light on Water" with a focus on the effect of what I call "glare." I had a large and receptive audience, and it was a real pleasure to show them how I create this effect.
The Society likes to have a presentation in the last hour of each monthly meeting. Although that's not a lot of time to do a full painting, I made sure to practice the demonstration in my own studio a few days before, and I also did a good deal of preparatory work, such as pre-drawing my design on the pastel paper I would use, to make sure things would go smoothly. For the demonstration, I used Blue Earth Pastels on Art Spectrum Colourfix paper.
(By the way, the scene has become important to me in a series of works. In my next post, I will talk about the progression of getting from the plein air study, done in oil, to two studio versions done in pastel, plus the demonstration, and then an abstraction.)
The demonstration was also recorded in video by Nicholas Tesluk and is available on the Pastel Society of New Mexico's web site at the "PSNM Resources" tab and on Vimeo. I've embedded the video above. (Can't see it? Here is the Vimeo link: https://vimeo.com/323380193)
