Prior to Sarah Bee becoming a member of the Pastel Society in 2005, Sarah worked as a graphic designer for National Magazines as well as a make-up artist and body painter for commercial photography and film. Sarah is best known for her highly emotive landscape pastel paintings. Ahead of the Pastel Society’s Annual Exhibition, I asked Sarah about how she first got started in Pastels.
39 x 39cm
Pastel
Pastel painting came out of the blue to me.
I was a watercolour painter but had begun to find myself frustrated by the medium’s limitations. I was painting with the Blockley group, and it was John Blockley who first suggested I try pastel; but I was initially resistant…
A short time later I visited the Pastel Society exhibition at the Mall Galleries in London in order to support a friend – and I was unprepared for the effect it would have upon me! I stayed so much longer than anticipated. All preconceptions were blown away by the mass of work there. So many very different paintings achieved by using the same medium…and huge numbers of them had such colour, life and spontaneity.
59 x 59cm
Pastel
I was inspired, immediately bought the kit, and haven’t done a watercolour since that exhibition! There followed a few years of trial and error, none of which deterred me from carrying on with pastel. Slowly I have found my own painting methods, and these continue to evolve.
59 x 59cm
Pastel
Traditional pastel supports don’t suit me. I prefer to work on mount board and to create my own ‘tooth’ with gesso. I follow this with a very wet and sploshy underpainting of acrylic before working a final layer of pastel. I’ve tried several types of pastel and find that Unison soft pastels offer the best quality and pigment and huge colour variation. I couple them with the smaller Conte a Paris hard pastels, and find I can achieve a good variety of marks and a lively painting.
59 x 59cm
Pastel
I would encourage anybody with even a small interest in pastel as a medium to give it a go…the possibilities are endless. Perhaps do as I did, and come to our exhibition to see just some of them for yourself!
Sarah teaches short courses at Jack Beck House and at West Dean College.
Details and more examples of work can be found on her website
THE PASTEL SOCIETY exhibition 10-21 June at Mall Galleries London SW1
