My art is created using Sennelier Oil pastels, which are highly rated for their UV resistance and intense pigments. Sennelier oil pastel colours will not begin fading for 100 years, nor will they crackle or corrode in the way that other oil pastels and oil paint will. This means that, as a medium, Sennelier Oil pastels are ideal for lasting impressionistic styles with a thick-impasto finish, which is why they’re my favourite!
Sennelier Oil Pastels were created for Pablo Picasso, or so they say, but such an advertisement was unnecessary for me, as when I was trialling different pastel brands I found them to be the obvious choice based on their versatility. I found that I could emulate oil paint if I wanted or use them differently to create a grainy effect which is more characteristic of oil pastels.
There are two important things to know about oil pastels.
One, oil pastels are quite the obscure medium in the art world, yes you can definitely look back throughout all of art history and find a good number of pieces which have been exhibited and praised with the same flattery as oil paint at times. It seems though, maybe because it’s quite a young medium in comparison, or because of their no-fuss use, that they are almost invisible as an acknowledged specialty or as a medium with enough consciousness surrounding it to be identifiable. What initially appealed to me about the medium was the spontaneity it allowed, I then struggled to find any major downsides to give me reason to not adopt it as my main medium.
There is however, one downside, depending on how you see it – leading us onto the second important piece of info. Oil Pastels are ‘non-drying’, so in other words, they stay wet, so they must be framed upon completion no matter what. It is on the other hand due to this quality that all the aforementioned advantages are possible, it can’t crackle if it doesn’t dry and it won’t fade because the colour is still chemically active.
Oil Pastels haven’t really been subjected to the level of experimentation that oil paint, acrylics or most other mediums have seen over the years, you could blame a lack of awareness or prestige as mentioned, but I think it’s more likely due to how unforgiving they are that most artists who have given them a try have been apprehensive to find new methods. Every brush stroke you make with oil paint is essentially reversible by wiping it off with a cloth, oil pastels however are too thick to allow for mistakes. In essence oil pastel art requires a little more compositional planning and technical finesse to produce an equal standard of execution. Another common deterrent around the use of oil pastels is their tendency to be stylistically restrictive, forcing bold lines over precision, and typically requiring greater force to properly adhere to a substrate. You also can’t ‘glaze’ with oil pastels as you do with oil paint, that is, adding thinned-out translucent layers to build-up an image, oil pastels are almost completely opaque which requires a wholly different approach to creating a coherent and comprehensible image.
Oil pastels have the potential to be a weapon in the arsenal of the everyman, time and space tend to be the main considerations which dissuade people from exercising their right to expression through art, but the ability to get started at any moment with little to no preparation or convoluted apparatus not only provides much needed accessibility in our increasingly busy lives but allows us to harness inspiration with immediacy.