They arrive ready to work, carrying the tools of their trade in plastic or wooden boxes, a hand sewn fabric pouch. They carry clipboards and portfolios and vulnerable works-in-progress wrapped in plastic to guard against the rain.
These are the 10 students in Becky Clark’s advanced pastel studio class at ArtSpace Community Art Center in Greenfield. The 10 — Karen Savage, Claire Blatchford, Paula Olson, Sharon Roth, Laurie Neely, Joyce Lanciani, Cliff Carlson, Liza O’Neil, Carolyn Gross and Gail Oswald — have a show up through April in the ArtSpace gallery.
If you know nothing at all about pastel, the show will demonstrate what a versatile medium it is. Each artist has a unique style of working and a distinct compositional eye. They create landscapes, still lifes, close-ups of flowers or portraits of people, farm animals or pets. They work in palettes muted and bold, using strokes that range from highly controlled to fluid and loose.
Cliff Carlson of Leyden creates detailed landscapes that rely on exacting lines — you’ll recognize the Main and Federal streets intersection in Greenfield and the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
Carlson, who has been taking pastel classes for three years, says he likes the “immediacy” of the medium.
“It’s a form of drawing, which I’ve always liked,” Carlson says.
Like most of the others, Carlson works from photographs, as does Claire Blatchford of Shelburne.
Blatchford takes a photo in her flower garden and then isolates just one small section, creating a composition somewhat abstracted from the overall scene. Blatchford likes to work back and forth between lighter and darker hues, “into surprise.”
Laura Neely of Orange says that she used to be a potter, which may be why she likes the way you “get your hands in” with pastels.
“They’re very direct,” Neely says.
Neely’s series of scenes in Egypt was done on finely sanded paper that grabs the soft pastels she works with, creating a soft, luminous effect.
Clark, who has been teaching art at ArtSpace since 2009, had used pastels while an illustration major at Syracuse, but worked predominantly in watercolor and gouache. She rediscovered pastels about 15 years ago, while getting her master’s degree in art at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.
At first, she was just “banging around in the dark” with the pastels she’d had in college, Clark says, applying a lot of what she knew about drawing. She now loves the medium and teaches both beginning and advanced pastel classes in 15-week sessions at ArtSpace.
Clark has a studio at the family’s Clarkdale Orchard in Deerfield, where she helps out during the busy season. Her “Patty Pan Pastel Series” and “Little Landscapes” are inspired by her rural surroundings. You can find Clark’s work at Salmon Falls Showroom in Shelburne Falls. And a solo show, “Along the River,” will be opening in their downstairs gallery at The Blue Rock Restaurant in May.
Clark begins the class with a brief, voluntary critique session. The once-a-week, two-hour studio class is never enough time to really complete anything, she tells me, so students continue their work at home.
Again, the
diversity is
notable. Works presented for feedback range from representational landscapes to an abstracted close-up of rippled water to the beginnings of a portrait of two bright Mickey and Minnie Mouse figurines.
Gail Oswald of Royalston leans what looks like a finished landscape up on the ledge of the whiteboard.
“I’m thinking of brushing off the bottom,” she says.
“That’s what we love about pastel, it’s so forgiving,” Clark says.
This surprises me: the chalky grains seem as if they would be difficult to move around once on the paper, unlike what I imagine to be the more fluid medium of paint.
But Clark tells me that removing a layer of pastel with a brush or, more forcefully, with an eraser and then working over it creates a “pentimento” effect that can add interesting depth. Clark calls the rubbed away part of the work, “the ghost that’s left behind,” and says she likes the effect.
Clark sets a container of pastels on the table. There are wooden pencils with colored cores of varying hardness, as well as chalk pastels in round and rectangular sticks. Choosing a fairly smooth Canson paper from a stack, she shows me how to use the pastels to make various marks. She demonstrates how varying the pressure or turning the point of a pastel pencil can produce thicker or thinner lines.
You can draw with the tip of a chalk pastel in a motion similar to writing on a chalkboard and create a crisp line, Clark tells me. But you can also use the entire broad side to create a swath of color.
Clark lays down long strokes, one over the another, demonstrating a technique called, wonderfully, “scrumbling,” in which colors show through in broken layers. Colors can also be blended in various ways. Clark gives me the cut-off finger of a thin rubber glove — they wear the gloves at the orchard when they’re making cider, she says — and I experiment with mussing up the marks I’ve made. Blending can also be done with an eraser or with a “stump” or “tortillion,” artist’s smudging tools made from rolled paper. Razor blades can be used to scrape away or abruptly stop fields of cover.
And, as if that doesn’t give you enough different ways to work, the paper you choose also changes the effect you create. A heavily textured, darker paper shows more of itself through the chalk. On a finely sanded paper, the chalk gets ground even finer, producing a beautiful blurred effect.
I begin to feel the way the chalk moves across the paper or across other colors, and the way the grains get grabbed by the paper’s texture or repelled by an already heavily marked area. Eventually, as the layers build up, there won’t be anyplace left for the chalk to go, Clark says. She shakes her paper over a trash bin and I see the fine dust sift down.
“That’s what we call: ‘no more real estate,’” Clark says.
The chalk begins to rub off on my fingers as I handle them, turning them red, blue, purple, brown. I make curved lines, sharp lines, soft swirls of color. The others bend to their work, drawing, smudging, sometimes leaning back and squinting to see what Clark calls “the good bones” of their piece. I wouldn’t call anything I’m making art but I can feel how the medium responds now, the possibilities in it. And I can’t think of a better place to be than here at a table with 10 other people, experimenting.
Pastel Studio Spring 2016: Works by Becky Clark’s Advanced Pastel Class at Artspace, through April 29. Artspace Community Art Center, 15 Mill St, Greenfield, MA. Gallery hours: Monday through Wednesday and Friday, noon to 2:30 p.m. and 4 to 6 p.m.; Thursday, noon to 1:30 p.m., and 3:30 to 6 p.m., and by appointment. Contact: 413-772-6811; info@artspacegreenfield.com; or find ArtSpace on Facebook.
“Along the River,” an exhibit of Becky Clark’s pastels at the Salmon Falls Showroom downstairs gallery at The Blue Rock Restaurant, 1 Ashfield Street, Shelburne Falls. The show will run May through June, with a reception Sunday, May 15, 4 to 6 p.m. Contact: www.salmonfallsgallery.com; 413-625-9833.
To see more of Clark’s work, visit: rebeccaclarkartist.com