Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Life Drawing of a Young Woman (1982)

In 1971, I was given a box of Rembrandt pastels which I never used because I didn't know how to use them. In 1982, I brought them to a drawing class at Western Washington University and surprised myself by doing this drawing which was one of five pastel drawings done in a life drawing class setting. The drawing professor, R. Allen Jensen, asked me if I had seen the work of R.B. Kitaj or Francis Bacon. I hadn't, but I went to the university library to search for the work of those artists and understood why he had asked that question. The artists, Mary Cassatt and Georgia O'Keeffe, both of whom worked in pastel, had influenced me, along with Marc Chagall, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Arshille Gorky, Wassily Kandinsky, The Blue Rider group and Bob Dylan's music.

1 comment:

Loren said...

Funny, I've long been fond of pastels, which may explain why I use that affect so much in Photoshop, and I've also been fond of several of these artists, particularly the Blau Riter group, but I'd never made that connection before.