I've been playing around with oil paint for years but my primary medium for galleries and shows has been pastel. After a while, my landscapes in oil began to look very much like my pastel landscapes. Same look, just more trouble it seemed with brushes to wash, etc.
But when I was introduced to the still life oil paintings of Qiang Huang, my interest in oil started anew and I am on a disciplined quest to learn to paint with control. Still life is an excellent subject for that now just as it was for me when I moved from the black and white work of fashion illustration to learning about color with colored pencil. For these little oil still life paintings, my goal is to handle the paint loosely with the hope that the viewer is still able to recognize the objects.
I'm painting with oil each day, my pastels are untouched. When the new issue of Pastel Journal arrived in the mail today, I was surprised to feel uninterested in reading it.
When a medium no longer holds challenges for me, I begin to get bored. That is what happened with colored pencil. I loved it and fully embraced it as my primary medium for a dozen years. Now it has been about a dozen years with pastel. Will my next dozen years be with oil? Sounds good today because I'm happy with this little painting of my father's shaving brush, the shells my son brought back from Europe for me, a sprig of dried Statice and a Chinese spoon that belonged to my first husband. The shells took a lot of trial and error which of course means I must paint them again in another painting.
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