Painting To Find My Feet Again

Having suffered a bereavement in the family, it has been difficult to maintain interest in art, but going to a weekly art group has been a great help. I have been toying with pastel paintings ( they don't need much setting up - just paper and a few chalks) and although nothing very exciting had been forthcoming from my efforts, the past couple of weeks, I seem to have produced a couple of half decent painting. I thought that they would be worth posting here.
The first was something I dredged up from my own mind, I had started a background to try out some black sketching paper which I had been bought for christmas. Various family illnesses had stopeed me experimenting before then and I found it was not really suited to pastel, at least not for my style - I thought. However, I did not throw the background away, and looking for something to do last week I decided to carry on with it.

Now my approach with pastels is to cover the ground (paper in this case) with one, two or even three colours so as to provide an interesting base to paint on. This is an example:-

I then use an inexpensive hairspray (I am incorrigible!) to fix this layer for two reasons

1. I can overpaint without colours mixing or smudging
2. The grittyness of the fixed pastel layer provides a great "tooth" for subsequent painting

Although the black paper did not appear to work well at first, with the added (fixed) layer it became quite amenable to being used by overpainting. I stayed hard at work for about two hours with a short break for coffee and this was the final result.

You can see a larger version on my Flickr photo stream

Now I was very happy with this, and have received some very good feedback. I had at last done something I could feel proud of which wasn't totally abstract. Not that I have anything against abstract art of course, but I felt much better at this. Very atmospheric, I was told by one of my crritics.

Last night, with this in mind, I decided to try and finish a painting with a similar theme which I had started some time ago. Again, I felt pleased with the final result, although not quite so pleased as with the one shown above.

Again, a larger version may be seen on Flickr

I hope that I have come through what has been a very difficult time, and will be back to enjoying my painting and other artistic endeavours. They say time heals, well time and art may well be helping to do just that. Coming back from a very low point, I am beginning to feel quite positive and optimistic.