If you’ve ever looked carefully at a pastel painting, you probably noticed its delicate velvety quality, like a butterfly’s wing. The vibrant hues of pastels are unmatched by other media and easy to recognize once you’ve become familiar with their appearance. Their vibrancy comes from their purity. Dry pastels are made by forming pure ground pigments and chalk into sticks with a small amount of binder, allowing little to interfere with their raw brilliance. Liquid media combine pigments with liquid binders that bring their own qualities into play and over time may darken, fade, yellow, crack, or blister. When properly framed, pastel is among the most permanent of all media.

Renaissance artists often used pastel to do preliminary sketches for oil paintings and sculptures. Seventeenth-century artists were among the first to create works done exclusively in pastel using a full spectrum of colors. In addition to pastel drawings rendered with lines—leaving much of the paper or canvas visible—artists also created pastel paintings of shapes and forms that virtually covered the surface. Subsequently, pastel paintings earned regard in the art world as having equal stature to that of oil paintings. By the 19th century many renowned European artists had used pastel to create exquisite masterpieces.

Artist Sandra Langston works in both oil and pastel, and says about the latter, “ I enjoy the effects that pastels can render on things such as grasses, which can vibrate with color if left unblended, and on reflecting water, which can be highly blended for a glasslike effect. Wherever there is high contrast, with lots of light, pastels do the job for me.” Langston paints Italian countrysides that she became fascinated with while participating in archaeological illustration activities in southern Italy, as part of a program sponsored by the University of Texas at Austin. When composing a painting, Langston works from photographs and imagination and likes to “ juxtapose elements from different photos, or from imagination, which have different light sources. I think this can lend a subliminal tension to the piece, for example, if the clouds are illuminated from the right, and the landscape from the left.” Langston lives in Italy and travels “home” each year to deliver a fresh supply of work to Davis Gallery in Austin.

Austin artist Isabel Stensland says she likes the “immediacy” of pastels. She often paints scenes from her trips to Italy and southern Europe, as well as local scenes, in various states of abstraction. The images of Italian landscapes and architecture have an animated quality. Trees and buildings are caught mid-dance, striking a pose for the viewer’s enjoyment. Most of Stensland’s paintings begin with a sketch done in plein air. “I use the sketch in my studio to create an abstract of the scene. My goal is to express the joy that I felt when I first viewed the scene. I delight in completing a jigsaw puzzle from my abstracted sketches, using the powers of composition and color to achieve my goal.” In Rowing on Town Lake (photo opposite), for instance, the painting retains little resemblance to reality. The puzzle’s field of intense yellow spotted with curious shapes and lines of intense blues and reds compels the viewer to investigate the scene. Isabel can be reached at her studio.

Sara Sharp draws her inspiration from the Texas landscape and the ranch life she loves. Her paintings of cacti, cattle, and landscapes are rich with detail and radiant, captivating color. Still-life paintings of sunlit country kitchen tables dressed with fruits and bowls and embroidered linens demonstrate her deftness in rendering light, shadow, and reflection. In Pears and Glass (photo opposite), brightly colored, transparent glass plates and bowls transmit their hues in luminous bursts of light onto the soft tablecloth. Sharp says she loves “t he way pastels can express texture and atmosphere, and the possibilities they present with layering and blending to achieve a range of effects, from opaque to translucent.” Her work is available in the Hill Country at The Gallery at Spicewood and in Austin at El Taller Gallery.

Steven Napper, represented by Rivers Edge Gallery in Kerrville, paints portraits, landscapes, gardens, and scenes of cowboys, buffalo, Native Americans, and ranch life. His studio is in Ingram, Texas, near the beautiful banks of the Guadalupe River, the subject of many of his works. Though he also paints with oil, he favors pastels for the vividness of color and because they provide a special spontaneity that feeds his penchant for painting in plein air. His love of the outdoors is evident in his skillful renderings of majestic Cypress trees lining rivers and creeks that wind through the Texas Hill Country.

Early Texas artist Frank Reaugh (1860–1945) was a pioneer of plein air pastel painting in Texas. The University of Texas Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center has in its collection a series of seven large-scale pastel compositions by Reaugh. Entitled Twenty-four Hours with the Herd, it tells the story of cowboys and longhorns in the time of open ranges. Reaugh made his own paper and pastel sticks, and invented a lap easel for students to use on month-long sketch trips he led from Dallas to West Texas and New Mexico in the early 1900s.

Austin artist Lucretia Donnell Coke went on 10 of Reaugh’s sketch trips, and both artists are listed in the Dictionary of Texas Artists, 1800–1945, published by the Panhandle-Plains Historical Society. Coke’s composition, Cliffs of Tule (photo opposite), is in the permanent collection of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas, and she is represented by Warm River Gallery in Lakeway. Coke’s diaries of Reaugh’s high-adventure sketch trips are chronicled in the recently published Winged Clouds and Cobalt Skies. Coke creates beautiful portraits, landscapes, and recently, underwater seascapes of colorful scenes inspired by scuba diving trips.

Pastel societies have been established worldwide to promote the art form and are very active. Many artists are members of several societies on the local, regional, national, and international levels. The Austin Pastel Society, which boasts approximately 100 members, publishes a newsletter, maintains a Web site (www.austinpastelsociety.org), organizes exhibits, and holds demonstrations and workshops.

Their delicacy belied by their endurance and brilliance, pastels have attracted artists and art lovers for centuries. Contemporary Central Texas artists continue the tradition and create vivid velvety imagery. Take a careful look and prepare to be entranced.

Galleries/Studios Offering Pastel Art:
1550 Gallery
Austin Pastel Society
Davis Gallery
El Taller Gallery
Fine Art Pet Portraits by P. Box
Gallery on the Square
Isabel Stensland Fine Art (see Studios page for information)
Kerr Arts & Cultural Center
Maria Lyle
www. napperarts.com
Shorelines Gallery
TIPS on Art
Warm River Gallery--closed
Women & Their Work

By Barbara Lugge, publisher of Art Lover's Guide.

Photos courtesy of Sandra Langston, Isabel Stensland, Sara Sharp, and Warm River Gallery.