Linda Carey's Pastel Landscapes

Linda Carey Roman Forum Late Afternoon, pastel 2009 21 x 29 inches

Someone recently sent me a link to a wonderful show of Linda Carey’s pastel painting at the Keny Gallery in Columbus, Ohio. Regretfully, the gallery took the online images down at the end of the show on November 2. However you can see a number of her works at this link at the Washintong & Lee University . Many of these images from that link have high resolution version which really helps to get an better feel of there presence in absence of the real thing.

Living in Rome,pastel

A large portion of the work in this show depicted a number of landscape and architecture, many of Italian scenes. I’m drawn to these gorgeous pastels for lots of reasons but the luminous color, her great drawing and her quiet but compelling compositions.

In an email I asked Linda to say something about her technical process, she replied;

“I work directly from the motif, from multiple digital images, memory and experience, all to varying degrees depending upon the subject and my access to it. I usually work with pastels (hard & soft) on a ground of tinted gesso containing marble dust on heavy watercolor paper. Mine is a protracted process of building, erasing, rebuilding, erasing… and the gessoed ground is a surface that can take the abuse.
… Up to this point I have worked primarily with pastels, largely out of habit and comfort. I think that the medium has become integral to my working process and aesthetic. Pastel allows me to freely draw and paint at the same time, and make countless revisions over an extended period of time. The exploratory nature of drawing is important to me, but I think of my pastels as paintings because of the complex color interactions. However, for various mostly practical reasons I keep trying to get at the same feel with oil paint, so far mostly unsuccessfully.”

Perugia Wall Morning,pastel 2006 21 x 21 inches

She went on to talk about her broader aesthetic sensibilities;

“…in my search for a motif I see through the filters of emotion and visual memory. I see the world as it has already been painted, (Italian quattrocento and Dutch Italianate painters, Corot, Balthus, Lopez, etc.), so my response is as much to their paintings as it is to what I am seeing in front of me. I maintain an almost legalistic adherence to precedent, to the tradition of painting as selected through my own sensibility. The recent & contemporary painters I admire most are backwards-looking, deeply respectful of tradition, and yet express, to paraphrase Leland Bell, their own individual sense of the mystery of appearances.

I am not particularly interested in narrative. I see buildings (and interiors, still-life and the figure) as structures that reflect light, cast shadows, and provide a complex web of relationships from which to compose. It is important to me to record the essence and certain particularities of objects and beings, a space and a time and a quality of light, but achieving an harmonic whole is the ultimate goal. I do think that a persistent sense of longing pervades my work, but I believe that is an almost universal aspect of realist painting since ours is a fight against time to fix a moment.”

Striped_Villa,pastel 2005-7 11 x 10 inches

Linda Carey received her BFA and MFA from the University of Arizona in Tucson. She taught drawing and painting at the Columbus College of Art & Design, and was Visiting Professor of Drawing at the College of William and Mary until 2006. Her pastels have been shown nationally in a variety of venues.

Williamsburg Fog,pastel 16.5 x 29 inches