Speaking of Art Blog

Like many other artists, I have a love affair with certain colors. When I see them I almost salivate. I’m sure my pupils start to dilate too. Deep wine red is one of those colors.

But I have to clarify that first because there are many shades of deep wine red. Imagine you are sitting on a fence in an alternate world, a color wheel world. The fence is painted middle-of-the-road bright red. As you look down the side of the fence, the posts become increasingly darker red as you go downward because increasing amounts of black paint have been added to the red. Now imagine you have a stick in your hand, and on either side of the fence are separate pools of paint. On the right is a pool of red orange paint. If you put your stick in the paint it becomes darker red orange as you go down. Pretty far down you are at a deep raisin color. Now imagine you put your stick in the pool on the other side of the fence, the red violet side. As you go down deeper into the pool, black is added in greater quantities until near the bottom it’s a rich, deep wine color.

Well, guess what? I don’t like raisins, never have. Dark red wine? Mmm, that’s another story. But before I go further I have to tell you about my encounter with a deep red wine colored pastel chunk that started my quest I’ve been on for YEARS since then. It was back in 2007. I was taking a pastel workshop from Sally Strand at the Scottsdale AZ School of Art. Awesome instructor, awesome workshop. Anyway, a sweet, elderly woman standing next to me at her easel during the workshop was using a large variety of all different brand pastels. As happens at most of the workshops I’ve ever taken, somebody winds up spilling all their pastels onto the floor. Sorry to say, it was this woman. It’s the most painful sound a pastelist can hear. Many, if not all the pastels wind up breaking into pieces, some of which are no longer usable. That is what happened to hers. I immediately stopped working on my artwork and started to help her pick up the salvageable pieces. She told me early on in the cleanup to not bother with the small pieces, just the larger sticks. But being the frugal Dutchman that I am, I proceeded to pick up whatever I would consider still usable. I would hand her little piles of chunks along with big pieces of sticks, and she’d add them back to her palette. When we were all finished, she thanked me and then told me to cup my hands together. She then poured all the small pieces of all the different colors into my hands -- a gift in return for helping her clean up the mess. How sweet of her!

I don’t remember any of those colors I inherited…….except for one. It was a rich, deep, wine red pastel chunk, an end of a round pastel stick, highly pigmented, and so rich in color that it made my mouth water. A week later after I got home and unpacked my pastel supplies I decided to make it my business to try to find that one pastel stick and order it open stock online. All I knew was that it was round, highly pigmented, and a dark red violet. OK, so that eliminated some pastel brands right away, like the square shaped pastels or the harder pastels. But even with those not being considered, do you know how hard it is to try to find a single stick of pastel by studying little color swatches on a computer screen? Next to impossible. Meanwhile I was using up my precious chunk to paint this:

Delicate Curves

 

 

By the time I finished the hibiscus my beautiful dark red violet pastel chunk was completely gone. And during that time I had been ordering all kinds of dark red violet sticks from various pastel brands, hoping I’d find THE pastel stick. I ordered the Art Spectrum set called Red Wine & Roses, I ordered Unison Red 13, and I bought various other open stock Sennelier pastels whenever I took a trip to Chicago and visited the Dick Blick store. While they are all lovely colors they all veered either toward the red orange side of the fence or too far afield on the red violet side. Grrr! I was in love with a single round pastel stick and I didn’t even know what brand it was!

In all fairness to some makers of square pastels, I did find a beautiful Ludwig pastel, Red 240, which comes very close to my beloved pastel chunk, and I used it lavishly in my recent painting titled, Gathering Dusk. Also, there are 3 shades of a deep red violet in the Great American Artworks Very Dark set that are lovely too. They actually veer too far in the violet direction, but they are at least on the violet side of red. No, I wanted a pastel that still has plenty of red in it, but with only a touch of violet.

 Gathering Dusk

OK, so fast forward to Christmas 2014. I had told my family about two different pastel sets I’d like for Christmas, a 40 piece half-stick set of Blick pastels and a 50 piece half-stick set of Schmincke pastels. I received both, YAY! The Blick set will be wonderful as work horses. They are a nice medium softness and there are some colors in the set that I don’t already have. Plus, I want to see if they’re the type of pastel that I could recommend to my beginning pastel students. But what a surprise when I opened the Schmincke set. There, stick #48D, was my precious deep red violet pastel that I had been searching for and had long since given up on ever finding! Happy dance time.

I also received a beautiful infinity scarf from my husband on Christmas day, and serendipitously it was also all different shades of red wine, NOT raisins. Meant….to…..be, and a very Merry (red wine) Christmas to me.