Patsy Lindamood

Having spent about five years working almost exclusively in soft pastel, in mid 2016, I experienced a kind of fatigue with pastel, feeling constrained by the fragility of the medium, its framing requirements (an costs), and the widespread lack of public familiarity with and appreciation for pastel art. I yearned to work in a medium more portable, with far more options for transporting and for presentation. I turned again to drawing with water color pencils, drawing directly on the same Ampersand Pastelbord that had been my substrate for soft pastel. I began to experiment, discovering how the water color pencil could be manipulated on the Pastelbord with tools such as stubby stencil brushes, kitchen pot scrubbers, sandpapers and rubber-tipped blenders. Add water, with a lightly saturated brush, and the possibilities explode. Water-diluted layers of water color pencil could then be further layered with direct application of water color pencil to develop depth and strong color. Just as I had been able to create a broad of a range of textures and effects with pastels, I could manipulate water color pencil to achieve similar impact. Once these works are sealed with an acrylic finish, their hues can rival the bold and brilliant colors which are the trademark of my former soft pastel work From a distance, these paintings (generally classified as drawings in the exhibition and festival worlds) are often mistaken for photographs at a distance, being exceptionally detailed and highly representational. But a closer inspection reveals the marks of the artist, and how selective application of detail can trick the mind to supply far more “detail” than the artist’s hand has in fact rendered. More so than this sleight of hand with detail, the subjects of these wax pastel works seem to emerge forth from the two-dimensional surface of the Pastelbord as if they were living, three-dimensional beings