PASTELS

A pastel is made with a powdered pigment combined with an inert binder, resembling that first drawing implement given to a child: a crayon. While crayons offer children their first development of with the rotary mechanics of drawing, line, and color, pastels offer the trained artist a warm and nuanced medium, able to convery a wide range of scenes and atmospheres.

Like watercolors, pastels echo back to the first human drawings made on cave walls with a colored pigment. The modern history of pastels, like watercolors, is one that first saw the medium as a tool for drawing and keeping records of objects and animals. Since the Renaissance it has been made fashionable, unfashionable, and then fashionable again, mostly revived again and again by notable artists who each took the medium to a new level.

For example, in the 1800s Edgar Degas mixed pastels with almost every other medium to create luminosity, texture, and force, where pastels had previously offered only paleness and softness. This sort of experimentation continued on with different artist, punctuated by periods in which the medium fell out of favor. Some of the artists who helped the medium develop while putting their own mark on it are Mary Casset, Edgar Degas, Whistler, Maurice Quentin de La Tour, and Rasalba Carriera, and Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin. Two popular modern pastelists are Wolf Kahn and Daniel Greene.