A Work a Year in the Making

One of the reasons that I enjoy working in the medium of pastel is that I don't have to wait around for paint to dry, nor do I have to mix any of my colors. Any hue that I need is literally at my fingertips.

Thus, it's highly unusual for me to spend great lengths of time on a piece. For commissions, I may spend a month or two of time in my studio perfecting studies before committing to the larger format work for a client. That's about as long as I'll devote to a piece. Unlike artists who work in other media that may necessitate a slower pace of creation, I just don't have the patience to labor over something for months on end. At most, my biggest cityscapes take a few weeks in my studio.

The Queensboro Bridge 20 x 30 original pastel on board.

This piece, "The Queensboro Bridge," is an exception. I gathered the photographic reference material for it over a year ago when I first rode in the "5 Boros" bike ride through New York City. On the cityscape section of my web site, I relate a humorous story about the context of when I first encountered this view. But it took me a long time to turn this composition over in my mind and settle upon an approach to such a monumental subject.

This is the "solution" at which I arrived. I always like to lead the viewer's eye into a piece, so it was helpful to have the city street in the foreground to provide an entree into the subject of the bridge. And I also enjoy combining a natural element (fluffy clouds) with a hard-edged urban theme like this, so in the end, all of the deliberations were well worth it. Enjoy!