…or two. I tell ya, I honestly feel crazy sometimes when I think about how I would like to draw or paint something. Pastels? Pens? Watercolor? Crayons? Charcoal? My mind races around the many materials at hand and often I end up doing multiple versions. This is charcoal and pastel from the same photo of Gracie that I did the pen and Caran D’Ache version in the previous post. And here is yet another approach with marker and Caran D’Ache :
Each is done very quickly…a sketch. Sometimes I just want to see how each medium would turn out. Sometimes I’m actually searching for a certain “look”. If I were commissioned to do a portrait–charcoal and pastel are my favorites. But for sketching and exploring, anything goes.
I have to confess: I have this nagging thought in the back of my head that says I should have one main medium as an artist. The voice tells me that no serious artist bounces back and forth from this to that to the other…but rather has a medium he/she employs for sketching and then a medium he/she employs for “paintings”. Case in point–Wolf Kahn. I’ve been re-reading his book of pastels (which I totally recommend). He seems to sketch/paint with pastels, and then when making larger works, he uses oils. Straightforward. No fuss. No quandary about which medium to play with next. Even his sketches as a whole have an overall continuity in their execution, and this is easily carried over to his large oil paintings. My stuff? It seems all over the place.
But I have to wonder…perhaps many mediums IS my medium. Maybe I shouldn’t try forcing myself to “settle down” to one medium. (Indeed it seems a lot of the fun would be taken away.) Perhaps Mr. Kahn actually uses multiple approaches much of the time and the books and exhibits merely assemble works that are within one vein only. Then again, maybe not. But I am encouraged by a particular quote in his book. He says, “I have tried to avoid looking for a single style, trusting instead that every work will by necessity exhibit Kahn-ish elements; after all, I made each of them.”
I think I’ll trust this to be true for all of us!
