Art Vent

Letting the Fresh Air In

Catching up...

October 2, 2010 - 9:47pm -- Carol Diehl
I find I have taken an inadvertent vacation from my blog—not for any particular reason, I just didn’t have any thoughts or opinions, which anyone who has known me for longer than five minutes will find difficult to believe. It happens rarely, but it does happen.

I did go to the Chelsea gallery openings and saw some shows I enjoyed (Joan Snyder, Judy Pfaff, and Jane Rosen) and others I thought were ridiculous (best left unsaid), as well as Gerhard Richter at the Drawing Center in SoHo, which I didn’t love but, regardless, found surprisingly inspiring. I bought the catalogue and when I came back to my studio, all I wanted to do was draw.

I also discovered a new art material: PanPastels.  A while ago, out of the blue, the company sent me some samples to try, and I recently unearthed them. They call them “painting pastels,” and the colors, which are highly pigmented, come in little pots like rouge and are not overly dusty, so it’s like painting, but without the muss and fuss. I love that I can just up and leave the drawing board and when I come back hours later my brushes haven’t gone stiff, and nothing has dried up. They can be purchased in individual colors ($5.14 each at Dick Blick) and in sets, and my only complaint is that the sets don’t really contain what I want (you have to order a set of 20 to get one that contains orange!) and if they do there are duplicates (Payne’s Gray appears in both the gray and the blue sets of five each).  But it’s a small quibble, and every day I compulsively order more. 

Drawing, 9/30/10, graphite and pastel on paper, 9" x 12"

I also became completely hooked on a book—a fascinating, in-depth (875 pages), and completely annotated biography of
Lou Reed on my roof, in a chair by Phillippe Starck. Photo by Christian Coigny for Vitra, ca. sometime in the 90s 

Comments

I love the sketch! And that Beatles book sounds great. (Envy: George Harrison!) So glad to hear from another personal benefitter from TM! My husband adores David Lynch, and I bought him Catching the Big Fish our first Valentine's Day. Check it out if the new book doesn't cut it!

Thank you for this post. It's great to see and read about what artists are doing with PanPastel. It's very important to us.

Our rationale when developing the range was to develop a color material that was a dry color that worked like fluid color and worked for both drawing and painting.

We knew that we would put the material out there for artists, and they would know instinctively what to do with it.

I'd love to see more of your work with PanPastel.
Berni Ward
Co-creator, PanPastel Colors
http://www.panpastel.com/

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