Last weekend (Sept 19/20 2009) I participated in a wonderful regional studio tour in and around the town of Uxbridge, Ontario. Potter Cynthia Cupples (http://cynthiacupples.com/) generously invited me to share her home/studio space, so I happily set up a variety of paintings, my easel, and my pastels on Saturday morning. The results exceeded my wildest [...]
Author Archives: Ruth
Announcing a Plein Air Project: paintings for $100
September 9, 2009 – 11:45 am
My full time teaching career has made it (thus far) impossible to paint plein air (outside, in front of the subject) very much, so I’ve developed the skills to interpret photographs well, compensating for the distortions and limitations of the digital image. However, I do believe that painting directly from the subject has merits, and [...]
A Soft Touch
September 3, 2009 – 12:51 pm
Recently when I was buying supplies in my local art supply store (Bijan’s, in London, Ontario), the owner/artist persuaded me to try pastel painting on suede matboard–maybe because he had a big box of it on sale at the time? I’d had one or two experiences with it previously, but decided to give it another [...]
Pretty in Pink?
August 13, 2009 – 9:43 am
At the introduction to pastel workshop I taught at Meta4 Gallery in Port Perry last weekend, one of the students mentioned that a former instructor had told her she wasn’t “allowed” to use pink in her paintings! I’m sure this must have been said in jest, or perhaps it was a playful way to make [...]
PAC Juried Show Acceptance
July 27, 2009 – 11:39 am
I have just received word that two of my three entries into the Pastel Artists Canada juried annual show have been accepted: Indrawn Breath (the painting I performed “tree-age” on, as documented in a former post to this journal, and seen framed –with a reflection of me–below) and Salt Spring Summer (also see below). The [...]
A Day with the Pre-Raphaelites
July 25, 2009 – 4:55 pm
I recently attended a fabulous exhibition of pre-Raphaelite paintings at the Art Gallery of Ontario. This group of English painters from the mid 1800′s decided that art had gone downhill after the Rennaissance painter Raphael and they determined to paint in the manner and style of the early Rennaissance painters (hence, pre-Raphaelite). The group included [...]
Heads in the Clouds
July 24, 2009 – 5:10 pm
During a recent family visit, three of the women requested a “private” one-day intro to pastel workshop, so we rolled out the clouds… None of these gals had ever tried pastels before–pretty great results, eh? Congrats to all of you and keep pastelling! Next intro workshop, Aug 8/9 at Meta4 Gallery in Port Perry. As [...]
New Toys, New Ploys (or, It Can be Easy Being Green)
July 24, 2009 – 8:42 am
This May for the first time I splurged and traveled to Albuquerque New Mexico for the biannual International Association of Pastel Societies (IAPS) convention. It’s THE place to be for a pastel artist. Not only did I attend demos by long-admired pastel artists (including Liz Heywood-Sullivan, Les DeMille, Sean Dye and Jimmy Wright), I got [...]
The Power of Negative Thinking
July 7, 2009 – 11:07 am
Now, before you get worried that I’m turning into a pessimist, let me explain…I’m talking about a technique I’ve been trying this past few weeks in which you start by adding a layer of black pastel to the paper, and then erase back to the lights (i.e. work negatively). It’s an idea I got from [...]
Pastel Pals’ Show
July 7, 2009 – 10:08 am
Although I have been too tardy about posting to get this post out before the end of the show, I still wanted to mention a great show I saw in May at the Sunrise Gallery in Burlington, Ontario. A group of pastel painters who paint en plein air almost every week put together a fabulous [...]