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The Travel Pastels
In the fall of 1970, I had been reading Mortimer Wheeler’s Splendors of the East: Temples, Tombs Palaces and Fortresses of Asia and thinking about all the places I would never see, when I learned that I was to receive an NEA grant for 1971 (you did not apply for NEA grants in those days, they just arrived). Jean and I used the money that spring to go around the world and see the places in the book. I made hundreds of slides of everywhere and kept an extensive journal, but had no idea what to do with the imagery or the journal when we got back. By the fall of 1971, I had worked out a way to project the slides I had made onto watercolor paper prepared with a dark acrylic ground, use a gold pencil to trace the basic outlines of the projection, and then develop the painting with soft pastel. In the beginning (the Roman and Greek images in the European link below), I developed the image with a mix of acrylic and soft pastel; soon enough, however, I used only pastel... and also, soon enough, began to add images of places we had not been but wished we had. Thus, the Asia pastels were made from places I saw in fact and from places I saw in books, and all with not a documentary purpose but an aesthetic one--to evoke the desire for a far off shining. And, as far as the journal I kept on our trip, I used it as the base text for my 1976 Travel Book published by Arion Press in San Francsico. It was the first of their many since "livres d'artiste." [click http://www.arionpress.com/catalog/004.htm for that]
Click the pictures
to go to the paintings.
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