Pastel on Sennelier LaCarte, approx. 2.5" x 5".
I'm enjoying renewing my perpetual fascination with color, via these little pastels. (Especially as I'm experiencing a lot of frustration and lack of resolution in the oil + cold wax paintings lately.) These small pastels are not consciously landscapes, but the format, which seems to be the main format that excites me, has what seems to feel like a horizon line.
I like to think of these minis as little jewels, with their bright sparks of color. (And when I frame them, I always use a white mat and a thin black contemporary frame, so as not to compete with their own color identities.)
I'm currently fascinated by working on pure instinct as to color--I just grab whatever "feels right" at that moment. This applies to both the main colors as well as the accent colors. Sometimes the painting fails, but that's what's exciting--to see why it works, after the fact, or why it didn't work, when during the process it was unconscious, just a sense, an urge to grab orange, or turquoise, or what have you.
(I'm not doing a conscious analysis with color theory to see whether it "worked," or "didn't work." One--I, or you, or whoever wants to--certainly could do that, but for me often it kills the magic, whether the analysis is done before or after the painting. For me, it's usually just about how it feels. However, this is not to say that there aren't occasional times in other kinds of paintings that I won't analytically use color theory, or that occasionally I'll suddenly look at a previously done painting and realize with a shock that it had turned out to have, say, a primary color scheme even though I hadn't been aware of it at the time.)
From Gadjo's second day with us. This cracked me up--Gadjo looked to me here like a baby koala attached to its (ahem) mother.
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