Jean Sheppard Pastels - Landscapes

Southwestern Alberta, including Waterton Lakes National Park and the Castle-Crown Wilderness

Small Works in the Gallery

Pastels

Most people when they hear the word pastel immediately think of very pale colours such as pink and light blue. However as an art medium, pastel refers to sticks used to create paintings and drawings and the colours are rich and vibrant; anything but pale. Pastels contain some of the most permanent pigments available to artists and paintings made hundreds of years ago are still as brilliant today as they were then. The name pastel comes from the Italian word pastello (pasto – paste) as they are made by mixing dry colour with a binder, usually gum arabic or gum tragacanth, into a paste and then forming sticks. These sticks are quite different from the colored blackboard chalks made of limestone impregnated with dyes. Pastels cannot be mixed on a palette to make new colours the way oils and watercolors can. However they can be intermixed on the painting to create new colours by blending, layering, and juxtaposition.

Jean Perreal, a French artist, invented pastels in 1499. Pastel never became as popular an artistic medium as the more traditional oil or watercolour. However, many very well known artists such as Manet, Monet, Morrisot, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso all used it. Perhaps the most famous pastellist of all was the French painter Edgar Degas (1834-1917) with his paintings of ballet dancers and scenes from the racetrack.