JUNE 3RD - ANTHEA DE LA ROCHE - PORTRAITS IN PASTEL
Some announcements were made regarding the arrangements for our forthcoming exhibition in the Kingfisher Centre and for our participation in the Church Fete at St. Luke’s. The venue for the next painting day was announced and the members were asked for suggestions for subjects for workshop days, an innovation which is under consideration.
Anthea De La Roche was introduced to give her presentation on ‘Portraits in Pastel’ Anthea started by showing us some examples of her work and describing her career in art. For some time she was the resident artist on a cruise liner where she conducted workshops and carried out portrait commissions. In this period she painted many portraits and developed her very individual painting method. She strongly recommended working by natural daylight and working very close to her portrait subject to produce a life-size portrait head. She did not use pastel pencils, relying instead on the sharp edges of broken sticks of hard pastel to work on fine detail. She finds that hard pastels are most suitable for her painting but does resort to soft pastels for some passages of her work. So her materials were relatively simple, a selection of pastels and a sheet of grey-tinted Canson pastel paper.
No matter how good the painting technique, a portrait is not successful if the underlying drawing is not accurate so good drawing was her top priority and this, she felt, could only result from much practice and intense observation. It was not surprising that Anthea did not approve of any distortion of the drawing or any attempt to flatter the sitter.
Lois from the audience volunteered to sit for the demonstration and Anthea started her initial drawing with a medium brown pastel. She explained that her usual procedure was to start with a light tone and move on to the medium and dark tones but was adapting her method to work within the time scale of the demonstration. As she worked, she explained each step of her drawing and painting procedure. She chose one feature as a reference dimension and related all the other features to this reference. Similarly, she visually related every line of her subject’s features to the vertical and horizontal so that she could reproduce these accurately on her drawing. The painting progressed until it was tonally complete at which stage the colour; highlight and shadow detail were introduced. Finally she applied a very light overall glaze of pastel to unify the tones and colours and complete an impressive portrait. This was a presentation full of information and insights and was much appreciated by the audience. Anthea told us how she enjoyed conducting workshops and, since this is an activity that we are considering, perhaps we will see her again in this role.
Supported by Redditch School of Art through Redditch Arts Council
David Price
