Category: Oil Pastels
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The Atlantic…
If you remember, “more water drawings” was on my list of “10 ideas”, and I have stuck to my resolution of not having any more ideas until I use up the ones on my list. These two oil pastels are the first I’ve done since getting back from Portugal last month. It was refreshing to be…
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What’s going on?
This is the latest of my ‘water oil pastels’ – water scenes, done in oil pastels. The scenes are imaginary, a combination of photographs I’ve taken to use as ‘sketches’ and imagin-A-tion. In the case of these drawings/paintings, this means that you are not the only one who doesn’t know exactly what’s going on. Neither do I. And,…
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Indolence…
It’s the lazy season around our house these days. Next door there’s banging – lots of loud, house-building banging – which is unfortunate, because it’s just the time of year when my ‘outside studio’ is at its most pleasant. The banging (and the occasional excruciating whine of metal slicing through metal) has been a good excuse for not…
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“Shoot the Artist at the Right Moment”
There’s some saying I heard once somewhere about how to create a masterpiece: “Shoot the artist at the right moment.” Basically, what that’s saying is that artists tend to overwork, never know when to quit, and in the process of going after perfection, end up fucking things up. I was in the studio yesterday for the…
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Heads Above Water
I think that’s going to be the title for my most recent oil pastel drawing in my series of water drawings. When I was finishing this drawing, part of me wanted to paint out the white ‘waves’ so that the drawing would be just 2 disembodied heads in a field of blue. But I kind of like…
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Take me to the river, drop me in the water
Well, not the river but the sea, and I am feeling immersed in it, even though I am presently sitting well above the high-water mark inside a cafe overlooking the sea and Kos. The waves appear to be coming from the west – a reverse-migration? You might not believe me, but the lit-up waves are looking to…
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Valentine’s Day Open Studio
So, a friend of mine mentioned an artist she read about who was trying to survive on donations she was soliciting as a means of support for her art-making. I’m guessing that if she’s doing this through a crowdfunding web site, she’s “giving away” pieces of artwork as “gifts” to the folks making these donations. I suppose that…
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Swimming in the Same Waters
I was taking a break from whatever it is I was taking a break from by having a look at one of my few ‘favorite’ web sites, hyperallergic.com, when what to my surprise should appear before my eyes but a paintng by Katherine Bradford, Surfer, from 2015: “Hey,” I thought, I coulda done that!” It…
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The Sea in January
Last summer I managed to fit in one boat trip, but that’s all. While the primary goal was to chill out in some very clean blue water in the company of some very fine women, the secondary goal was to take photos that I could use as sketches for some more water paintings. Which I did. Take…
Deborah Semel Demirtaş 