(evoked by V. Kral) 

Many people even ignore its existence. 

Some art amateurs are frightened by its fragility. 

Pastel, this coloured powder with an infinity of shades and shades off, keeps its intensity untouched year after year.  It looks like chalk, it appears under the form of little sticks mainly used dry or sometimes diluted in water (it is then used like watercolour). 

You work pastel with your fingers, it allows both the quickness of emotion and that of graphical writing.

You can easily trace the idea and rub it off while privileging the softness and dullness of the matter, the brightness of the colours. 

The artists inventory and arrange the most various effects of pastel to infinity.

Some display more the haziness and vaporous quality of stumping and gumming.

Others superpose the colours on flat tint, they cross them out and scratch them with dots, stripes, hatching of opposite colours. It can be used as a painting by mixing it with water, crushing it and fixing it abundantly to get some relief.

The juxtaposition of the colours, the variety of the textures and the diversity of the formal possibilities agree with the personality of each artist.  Pastel is sometimes combined with oil pastel, watercolour, gouache, acrylic, charcoal or pencil in mixed-media painting, but it is incompatible with oil painting.

You can paint on paper of different colours and textures, canvas, jute, wood coats with well-sifted pounce, canvas coats with chalk, any porous and abrasive surface. 

It is a transitory and volatile texture and therefore the pastel powder raises a problem: how to fix it on the ground?

Many fixatives even today change its colours, dim its light.

I personally fix the pastel several times, between each stage.

Once the drawing is finished I entirely fix it and give a few touches here and there without fixing them. 

According to François Barbatre – 1983: 

From an accentuated drawing it was first, pastel might claim to be a real painting for the bold artist who will judiciously use a good fixative. The colours remain pure unlike those of oil painting, which are seriously damaged by an inherent process due to old age. 

Short historical account: 

One of the first known pastels is the portrait of ‘Isabelle d’Este’, 1499 by Leonard de Vinci.

This technique he calls ‘dry coloured process’, would have been revealed to him by a French artist, Jean Perréal.

Pastel is then used to accentuate the drawing portraits with some coloured touches, so it was during the whole XIVth century.

These portraits are called ‘three pencils portraits’ and combine black stone, red chalk and pastel. 

From the last quarter of the XVth century during the XVIthe century, all the artists from the Venice area mostly used blue paper, which was manufactured there and called ‘carta azzura’ or ‘carta turchina’. 

Afterwards it was used by the French and Dutch artists. 

Federico Barocci 1526-1612) inspired by Raphaël, Michel-Ange and the Correge made a synthesis between different great artists of his time. His interventions concern three aspects : expression , a new feeling about shape with blended relief which pastel marvellously renders, and finally the brightness sense by using lights effects from below.  In his pastels, which are preliminary sketches for the details of large compositions, he reaches a great science of colour and relief playing with the ground effects, on paper, cardboard in beige, chamois, grey or blue tints. 

Barocci will greatly influence the French artists of the XVIIIth century. 

Charles Le Brun (1619-1690) realised different portraits of Louis the XIVth . There were only preliminary sketches with a view to realise paintings on tapestries, but we can already admire the reproduction of clothes, wigs and the skin relief. 

With Joseph Vivien (1657-1734), pastel is not an intermediate study any more but a definitive, achieved artwork, with a size as imposing as that of oil painting. He has just created the prototype of full-size, solemn, majestic portraits, influencing all the portrait orders of the XVIIIth century.  This artist will be honoured by the Academy with the title of  ‘painter in pastel’. Vivien especially influenced Maurice Qentin de La Tour. 

Maurice Quentin de La Tour (1704-1788) prefers to come back to a more realistic and sober approach.  He only uses pastel (there is no oil painting by his hand).  He is the portrait painter of the Royal family and also realises portraits of all famous people of the court.  His basic search was to evoke the psychological aspects of the characters through the expressions of the faces.  He wanted to translate a feeling, a short and instantaneous emotion.  Pastel painting had got its letters patent of nobility, it was finally used to realise important master pieces.  Each artist employed it according to his own style. 

- Portraits and everyday life 

Pierre Briard (1559-1609), Antoine Coypel (1661-1722), Rosalba Carriera(1675-1757),

François Boucher (1703-1770), Jean-Baptiste Perronneau (1715-1783), Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702-1789).

- Sociological portraits of lawyers, artists and middle-class people 

Gustave Lundberg (1695-1786), Joseph Boze (1745-1826), Jean Siméon Chardin (1699-1779), Maurice Quentin de la Tour (1704 –1788). 

- The Impressionists (end XIXth – beginning XXth century) 

Eugène Boudin, Edouard Manet, Alfred Sysley, Camille Pissaro, Auguste Renoir, Toulouse Lautrec et Edgard Degas.  

- The Symbolist artists (XIXth – beginning XXth century) used pastel in a hazy and vaporous way in order to better suggest dreaming, the unconscious, the strangeness of the imaginary world:

William Degouve de Nuncques, Odilon Redon, Fernand Khnopff. 

- The XXth century with Frank Kupka, Arthur Dove, Paul Klee, Joan Miro, Willem de Kooning, Matta, Jackson Pollock... 

Some contemporary figurative artists are almost exclusively involved in pastel production.It's not possible to quote them all , but here are some names: 

French artists:

Pierre Skira, François Barbâtre, Le Gac, Olivier O. Olivier, Daniel Pommereule, Sam Szafran.

Belgian artists:

Denis De Rudder, Maurice Pasternak, Jef Van Griek, Vivian Kral.

English artists: Michael Bastow. 

The making of pastel 

Pastel is composed of:

pigments (also used for oil colours, watercolour, gouache, acrylic colours)

charges (talc, kaolin, clay)

a solution of gum arabic or tragacanth 

The principle of the making of pastel is a correct balance between hardness and tenderness.

Pastel mustn’t crumble between your fingers but should leave enough matter on the paper. 

The first stage of the making regards the proportion of the aforesaid matters.  It can vary according to the nature of the pigment. Every time this proportion can change according to the qualities of the raw materials delivered.

The second phase is the grinding of colours and charges, which are mixed with water in the binder. The grinding is performed on a crushing machine, which includes a hopper and two porcelain discs. The fine ground paste is more or less sticky. When out of the grinding machine, it drops on a canvas.

The third phase of the making is the drying.  The paste is collected on a solid canvas, which is folded in a way to form an envelope to be pressed to extract water.  After this operation we get a ‘wet cake’, which is put in a drawing plate after grinding.

In the fourth phase of the making the tough paste is introduced in the drawing plate and a cylinder about one meter long is obtained thanks to the pressure.  This cylinder will be put on a kind of wood tray and as it is soft it can be proceeded to its cutting and marking of its reference.

The drying time is about two weeks long before it is possible to proceed to the conditioning of the pastel. 

Bibliography: LE PASTEL ( SKIRA)