Canmore Art Guild member Anne Noel-Martin loves working and creating with chalk pastels, but they do not love working with her.
Canmore Art Guild member Anne Noel-Martin loves working and creating with chalk pastels, but they do not love working with her.
Noel-Martin found herself literally suffering for the love of her art when she discovered she had developed allergies to chalk dust created when she would work in her studio.
She recently switched to acrylic painting, but will have a chalk piece in the Canmore Art Guild's upcoming exhibition, running March 28 to April 21 at Canmore's Elevation Place. The piece is called Just a Second and it is a vision of a drop of water in blues and 21x18 inches framed.
“The piece that I've put in is a very old piece, it's only been shown once and it's a pastel. I had to stop doing pastels for a few years due to my health – it's my first love and they're the paintings I'm most proud of,” Noel-Martin said.
Due to diligent research, Noel-Martin believes she might have found a way to return to her use of chalk by investing in new equipment and changing up her technique.
“You know the little port-a-vac machines they have? If I work on a piece lying down flat as opposed to my easel standing up, every so often I can suck up the dust, so if I wear a mask, wear gloves and use this duster, then I'm going to give it a try,” said Martin.
“I have been using pastels in the summertime when I go out to paint en plein air, but I can't use them inside – it's a hazard for any medium in the arts, everything has some kind of a poison, unfortunately.”
She says the trick is to isolate chalk particles to your work area and remember to take your shoes off so you don't track it through your entire house. You have to put a mask on if you don't want to breath it in.
“As soon as I touch a pastel I can taste it and that's not good,” Martin said. “Artists will generally ignore problems; I said for many years I would rather be dead than not do my pastels and I was getting to the point where I was getting quite sick and I said well maybe I'll try acrylics and I've been working in acrylics ever since.”
The immediacy and showing of texture while still being able to blend are what Martin says makes her truly love and fight for the medium.
“It's drawing, it's painting – it's everything. It's all of the creative bundle tied into one magnificent medium that can glow or that can be soft,” Martin said.
“You can see things that are blended, like the piece I have of the water drop in the show. It comes down to the blending; you can layer colour in the chalk pastels in a way that you can't in any other medium.
“You can put 14 layers on a good textured piece of paper and you can find every one of those colours in it and your eye does. The foremost thing to me is the colour for anything I work in.”
