PAINT WITH DIFFERENT MEDIUMS TO OIL: DRY PASTEL AND WATERCOLORS, SOME REFLECTIONS
The oil paintings were for the big exhibitions, but the pastels were the medium of the moment, i.e. done without so much planning, which gives them the characteristic of an impressionist technique (...)
When the Impressionists exhibited at their Salon des Indépendants, what was striking was the large number of works in pastel compared to oils on canvas; the simple, economical and spontaneous medium of pastel in fact allows those who know how to extract its power to paint in greater volume and frequency of production; in the case of the Impressionists, pastel could even be considered to be, according to their radical philosophy, at the apex of Impressionist techniques.
Oil paintings were for the big exhibitions, but pastels were the medium of the moment, i.e. done without so much planning, which gives them the characteristic of an impressionist technique, whereas many oils on canvas were done in a more planned way, and according to a certain luxury of production; logically, this is not an absolute rule that artists used, but the fact that pastels are a medium allows for a more "impressionist" approach to the work, i.e. more momentary, more spontaneous and more direct.
This spontaneity is certainly due to the material support, since most productions on paper require fewer problems to be solved; however, it is possible to paint spontaneously on canvas, but there will still be the problem of mixing the colors on the palette to be solved, in the case of pastels, the mixing is done on the support itself, rubbing, smudging, being, as Da Vinci so aptly put it: "A dry painting".
As at the time when painters were independent of the academy - the so-called "Impressionists" - acrylic paints (which dry more quickly) were not yet available, it was possible to make large pictorial sketches with the same ease as a drawing, i.e. by simply holding a drawing board and rubbing the chalk over the paper, capturing the tones of what you are observing before your eyes, As well as just sitting on a chair and table, taking a few sticks to study the tone of the moment, watercolors and pastels became the preferred means for many painters to make simpler paintings and studies that would lead them to a mastery of tone through the subtlety of the eye and that would later provide them with a better mastery of oil painting through the mastery of more fleeting painting techniques.
We can mention Edgar Degas, Mary Cassat, Berthe Morisot, Anders Zorn and William Turner (the latter two in watercolors) among the many painters who were skilled at easel painting in oils and who produced more pastels or watercolors than oils. Adolph Menzel, for his part, at a certain point in his career abandoned the impetus to produce oils, inclined to the attractions of producing countless gouaches.
On the other hand, there were Rococo painters - during the centuries of the rise of the dry pastel technique, respectively the 17th and 18th centuries) - who produced dry pastel paintings of a clacissistic realism (magnificently finished) that surpassed many oil paintings, which made pastel painting popular and edified under the hand of Rosalba Carriera.
However, for artists like Odilon Redon, pastel was the main medium of his work, used in a heterogeneous way and delving into the effects that the pastel material could give to the support and whose profound effects no other medium could replicate.
Watercolors and gouaches require water as a medium for their colors, which makes them a simpler and even easier medium to paint with. You can paint with them in closed and unventilated spaces, such as bedrooms and apartments. Their nature of harmony with the paper made them a favorite medium for illustrators (before the advent of the digital age), who inherited their techniques of color, painting and harmony of tones from the oil painters of antiquity. All you need for pastels is a table, a piece of paper, a few sticks (there are cheap, high-quality brands on the market) and your fingers; once you've finished painting, you just need to spray them with a layer of fixative varnish. They are also easier to store compared to oil paintings on canvas, whose wooden frames require a certain amount of space and greater care to prevent dust from accumulating on the surface. As for watercolors and pastels, all you need is a plastic folder and the paper will live there under good conditions. However, an alternative way to store more oil paintings while taking up less space would be to paint them on the canvas outside the wooden frame and, once they have dried, roll them up and then store them in a tube or cupboard.
To a certain extent, gouaches, pastels, acrylics and even watercolors (if the watercolorist knows how to get the most out of them) can be very similar to oils, which in fact, according to some old techniques - such as oil painting with varnishes - are very similar to watercolors for painting overlays and transparencies.
It so happens that the technique of art - the realization of the work - is a philosopher's stone, in other words, it is an absolute conquest for achieving the work, which can be applied in any medium, respecting its levels of power in certain aspects that are limited in certain mediums to be expanded in others, through the unique path of the work. Thus, the same path as for watercolors can be applied to oils, and vice versa, ditto with pastels.
In my honest opinion, the power of oils (their plastic capacity) is unsurpassed, which is why I don't consider them to be only good for lengthy paintings done in several layers (for the effect of realism in painting), but they are good for fleeting paintings, for impasto, for the very impressionist way of painting; oils transmit a material plasticity that makes paintings emanate a three-dimensional force through a two-dimensional support, with a plasticity similar to that of clay that shapes the forms of a sculpture.
But the subtlety of the other techniques (pastels, watercolors and gouaches) is unique, and the possibility of producing countless drawings or paintings, as well as the simplicity that these media require to make them, make them an irresistible invitation to probe their nuances, explore their particularities and master their technique.
PS: The illustrative image at the head of this text is of my work "Dialectics", done in dry pastel on paper. It was made in 2022 and was the first dry pastel made after years of not smelling chalk.
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