Flowering Maple Print

I love the medium of pastel/chalk for the ability to bridge drawing and painting and chalks have an amazing tradition in art. The softness of the medium, the ability to touch its surface in making form and the stark brilliance of its pigments I believe bring life, nature into a vivid presence on a 2-D surface. It may not look like it, but I really take my time in this medium. As I began with abstract color shapes and ended by adding the red budding maple – the figures somewhere in between, well, several months ensued. Was there a need for something outside of the work itself to ensue? Perhaps, as I noticed in early March, the maple outside my window, awakening and the branches filled with small red blossoms, I knew where I was headed in completing this. Do you ever feel that a change in season, no matter how subtle, sends your senses into a frenzy? I like longer daylight and some sense that a glacier somewhere is receding, and then out pop flowers and I seemed so amazed that much is happening at once. That is how I would describe it and I’m sure we all have a version of this! That is how I would describe this pastel.