Because it only seemed like yesterday when I picked up that pastel and applied it to paper. Canson pastel paper, felt gray, number 429 I think was what it was listed as. Because when I first applied that flesh colored chalk to the paper and saw what a beautiful color and grain it got, it was love at first sight. No oil, acrylic, watercolor, gouache, pencil or any other medium could ever do what I saw this do before my very eyes and it was coming from my hand – and that’s when my life changed!
– Whole new worlds opened up. Old ones and new ones – the past, the present, and the future all changed before my very eyes because I wasn’t just working in a guard house at some condo in Miami anymore I was now in a tropical paradise, where sometimes the best part of my day was the night – with the sensual tropical smells and sights under a full moon on the water with the palm trees and whether or not I was here or somewhere else, in my mind it all came alive. Walking now down by the water day or at night became a source of enchantment and inspiration to be either captured as it was or whatever other fantasy it may have spawned, because a warm tropical night could by the touch of my hand become a cold snowy day in the mountains of Montana or a whole host of other images that unbeknownst to me had been pent up for years – plains, high plains, mountains, rivers, Blackfoot, Sioux, Cheyenne, Crow, yes – it all took flight.
What initially started in a mere guard house, now became the door to Worlds Beyond and my nights were filled with such wonder and fantasy, I couldn’t wait to come back the next night to travel to anywhere I could imagine, producing works that now even made me question whether indeed teaching was it or could this in some way go so far beyond anything I ever could have imagined – because now I had discovered the perfect vehicle to give substance to all my fantasies. No longer was I bound by mere paper or pencil where I’d merely walk or trudge, laboring, erasing, struggling to bring it to life, but now I SOARED, as fast as I could do them as though all my years of laboring with a pencil now paid off as I drew in a way that was more than drawing and yet painting in a way that was more than painting – more like sculpting yes running my fingers over my pigment until I could mold it into any image I wanted yes because now the feel of the chalk on the paper – which was more than just paper but a fabric with color and texture that could absorb only what I wanted it to, holding the chalk out there as though it were separate – in midair – so that a leaf was suspended rather than a part of the paper or a face or hand had a life of its own beyond the paper and like God I could almost speak it into existence or “touch” it into existence, too much would lose it and it’d be part of the paper overworked and flat – not enough, it’d lack substance and evaporate – but just right, it had an existence of its own, a face, a leaf, a tree, whatever I chose to focus on could leap out at any point if I touched it just right – Earth and Sky – matter and spirit – flesh and soul – together and yet separate
So it was with that in mind I opened up my box of pastels once again. But this time not just black and white like the one I recently dabbled with. But this time it was for real… as I sat down and put my Canson felt gray pastel paper number 429 on my easel and then looked.
and that was the start –