Oil Pastels, mark-making, Seurat..

Oil pastels have an interesting origin: as I understand it Picasso approached Sennelier in 1949 and asked if they could develop a hand held form of oil paint that could be applied to a wide range of surfaces. I first used oil pastels in my 20’s and keep coming back to them. They are amazing to draw with and then blend.

Seurat’s work is usually described in terms of color theory and pointillism, and his mark-making is explained in that context. But his marks are often far more interesting and expressive than simply pointillistic, often a kind of “atomic” expressive gesture-making, that varies in each mark, and is repeated throughout to generate the overall image. His Boy Sitting in a Meadow is a beautiful example, take a look. Perhaps these works were precursors to the more formal pointillist paintings, but to me this way of working, expressive gestural mark-making at the “local” level from which an overall image “emerges”, feels not just eloquent but also achieves something fundamentally different from other ways of applying paint. It is a more evolutionary (bottom-up) process, something very dear to my heart and related to my interest in emergent systems and cellular automata. I would even suggest there is a direct line from this kind of work to the work of an artist like Mark Rothko, the generation of some kind of “spiritual” space. I find it very beautiful and reflective of a wonderful property of nature: the whole is greater than the parts.

Oil pastels lend themselves to this method, since you can “dot” them, but also twist and push them around at the same time, in a way that is quite different than working with a brush or knife; the medium itself is the tool. They’re also wonderful for expressing interacting edges between forms and spaces. I’m finding my way with this, have little skill, .. here are a few examples and I have a slide show with more work with oil pastels.. Click on the images to see the mark-making more readily.