Pastel Paintings by Antonia Carriere

January 11, 2015

POWDER RIVER CROSSING II, for Variations in Sevens show,
Crossroads, Baker City, May 2014.
I wanted to try a different composition that played up the
repeating pyramid shapes in the background.
More reds and oranges are in the painting than my photo file shows.

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Painting thoughts

With pastels I have finally found the medium that truly excites me. In the process of teaching others to use pastels I've become even more conscious of why it is so exciting.

First is the inherently tactile quality of the experience. There is no other tool between painter and the paper other than the medium itself . One's fingers feel the varying vibrations of the tooth of the paper differently with the each of the kinds of strokes and density of pastels used.

Then there is the very immediate quality of the process. There is never any waiting as there's no drying time. This allows for a very quick fluid approach which is the way I most love to work. It's instinctual and organic, very zen.

Equally thrilling is the way that colors are mixed on the paper. The right colors are found through the adventure of laying one color over another a process that is continually surprising. The exceptionally dense hues of dry pastels are said to be the purest pigments of all the artist's mediums and thier particulate nature reflects light differently than other mediums making for a luminous vibrancy.

What I most hope to express in my paintings are a sense of the energy of nature, the depth of atmospheric light fall and all the color that the eye and heart find that a camera can miss.

Thank you for viewing my paintings on this site.

Antonia K. Carriere