Four Miles From the Sea

What is the meaning of Still life ? I was thinking about how I love to
paint or at least , how I used to paint. Nowadays I have turned to
pastel. I am not quite sure how one describes being a pasteller ,
because I am sure it’s not quite that! It does not seem right to call
it painting. Do I say I have pastelled a picture? I am not honestly
quite sure. It does not sound quite appropriate for the seriousness and
effort of the endeavour somehow.

Oh yes, I just pastelled does notsomehow have the ring of the authentic artist who can say, all coveredin oil paint and smelling of turps that they have just completed their
oil painting - somehow this looks and sounds much more grand.

Pastel is afterall just a glorified chalk, as my husband illustrated so
well only the other week. Why, I ask ,did we pay £25 for a £50 set of
pastels and think we had done really well, when my husband went out
and bought 10 beautiful smoothe and brightly coloured chalks for
65pence and then proceeded to produced a fantastic picture?

But there is infact an incredible joy that comes from lining up a vase
of flowers and creating something that did not exist previously. Of
bringing the stillness to life.

Infact I actually love to use pastel - it is in reality a wonderful
medium and , for someone with extremely limited energy, much more
immediate than having to set up pots of water, set out all the
brushes, find the watercolour paper,mix up all the colours and then
wait patiently ( or impatiently in my case) for the paint to dry
before applying another coat. Ofcourse ,if you do not wait, you get a
muddy messy dirty picture that disappoints the eye and ends up in a
torn heap on the fire - the transluscence is all gone. And this is
afterall the reason you paint with watercolour - it really does have a
beautiful freshness and simplicity.

Sad to see the beautiful flower youwere trying to paint turned into a mucky tired wilting dirge of a
tulip.

More recently I have discovered the art of portrait - it has taken a
long while. My husband and I tend to be people who love to passionately
do the same thing ,then do it in passionately the opposite way. So I
do pastel, he does pencil, I do watercolour, he tries oil paint, I love
flowers, he does faces and so it goes on. I never thought in a million
years would I ever be interested in faces. Far too complicated. Far too
detailed. Far too skilled - after all , a face does need to look a bit
like the person you are drawing - it needs to have some recognisable
features. Me - I have done cartoon figures all my life - and my
drawings look like an 8 year olds( no disespect to an 8 year old
intended). Or so i thought till one winter evening I had no flower to
pastel....

And so began a new romance ; the romance of colour and shadow ; the
creation of a beautiful face from an empty page. And I discovered that
actually I could do better than I had imagined. The face that
materialised before me was a joy to create - each line, each nuance,
each shading of white where the light was shining on the cheek or the
forehead. Each stroke transformed the face from stillness to life. It
really was amazing - a magical discovery. I saw for the first time how
much of a face is light - how radiant and essential it is to use the
white pastel to create the aliveness of the face. Without light you
have no contour, you have no smile, you have no joy.

And when I finally showed my husband the picture I had done ,it was
just such a pleasure to see him smile in recognition - for I had shown
him something of himself that he had not previously seen. Because I had
painted it in love and love had wrapped tenderly around each pastel
line and stroke to create a living piece of art it seemed that smiled
back off the page and said ‘I am truly beautiful.’

In actual fact I had used a photo for the image and I kind of felt
like it was cheating. But then I realised it is the life that you put
in to the picture that counts , the tenderness of the way you stroke
the paper with the pastel, the feeling towards your subject brings the
still picture on the page to life. . Even an apple is alive - as my
sister gleefully informed me at about the age of 6 when she
mischievously told me I had just murdered the apple that I had eaten.
So the concept of still life is afterall, an anomaly
because it is, still , life - and full of aliveness ,in just the same
way that lying in bed unable to move, is a very still life indeed.

But it's the way my husband tenderly strokes the pain away that brings my
life to life. He sees the inner me and somehow he brings it out. He
sees the life in me and he loves me tenderly - he sees the light and he
brings it out in all its radiance - his love light shining towards me.
Even paralysed as I often am then , I can still say in absolute
honesty - it’s still life. A great and true motto to have after all.