Newport Harbor Museum Pastels

1981

This is a format I like so much—things appearing and disappearing. This comes back again and again in the graphite drawings, the cut pieces, the polycarbonates.

They were all done on beautiful neutral-pH rag paper, with pastels that I made while I was in college, which had more pigment than most. I laid down the pastel, then rubbed it in with silk. The silk cut the surface of the paper so that the pigment was more readily embedded. They were all sprayed with Dumar matte.

The initial interweaving finger pattern evolved into a complex brick-like structure, which can be seen in Homage: Sadat and Green Sea.

Green Sea was a nonette, a 6.5 foot-by-10-foot silk-rubbed pastel piece made in nine parts. “Nonette” is a musical term, I didn’t know of a parallel term for visual art. It was put into the collection at the World Trade Center in New York City. It was destroyed with the towers in 2001.