Painting The Landscape In Pastel, Albert Handell and Anita Louise West

This book arrived in a post yesterday. No art books for me for Christmas so I thought I’d better order one and learn more about using pastels during my year end painting hiatus. This is a nine inch square, 128 page paperback. Quite a short book by modern standards but, to be fair, this was first published in 2000. For a coauthored book, there’s a lot of use of the word “I” and I’m not sure who wrote which bits – this is already a slight red flag as I like to get into authors’ heads while reading but can’t tell which head I’m looking inside at any one time.

After the introduction, we have (starting on page 12!) ten chapters. They’re all of similar 6-12 page lengths except for chapter 9, the meatiest chapter in the book, clocking in at 36 pages. These chapters are:

• Advantages of a dry medium – nothing new here
• The usual chapter on materials – presumably useful to some but I’m settled now on my choice of pastels and paper
• Colours – stuff about complementaries, values, temperature, saturation. First few tips starting to appear.
• Light conditions – lots on shadows and the difference between having a subject lit from the front, the side or behind. Also stuff about light conditions changing during the day because this book is very plein air focused.
• How to choose a subject
• Tips on painting from photos
• Some stuff on composition – centre of interest, picture planes, whether to paint a big vista or crop down to a close-up
• A chapter on types of stroke, blending, lifting, etc
• Then the biggest chapter, with loads of tips on painting skies, clouds, trees, water, rocks, seasons, architecture.
• And finally a chapter on starting a painting outdoors and finishing it in the studio.

Style-wise, this is a book that (compared to others) relies on pictures more than on text. It was a fast read, with not very much text in the main body. Without a bit of text next to all the paintings in the book, I’d have got through it even more quickly. There are five demonstrations, all of them five steppers and taking up two pages each in that big ninth chapter. These demos feel a bit superfluous. I didn’t learn anything from them. For demos to work, they need to complement the rest of the book, referring back to the five step plan (or whatever) that the author was introducing to us just before. But the author just threw out a stream of tips and never set out any step by step painting process, so the demos had nothing to hang off of. There was also nothing to learn from the paintings and their descriptions. If anything, the paintings were only there to inspire. But did they inspire me? Only partly. Albert’s colours are quite vivid and there are some clashing juxtapositions: I quite liked seeing this, and that it’s something an artist can get away with. On the other hand, these paintings often included big shapes with no visible colour variation within them and that’s not something I can ever see myself doing. Albert also seems to start applying hard pressure with his pastels much earlier in the process than I do and that’s not something I’ll be going back to.

Did I learn anything from this book though? Yes. Mainly in the big chapter but also in the chapter on colours. There are two big lessons I came away with from this book, two things that I should really have known before but didn’t. I won’t embarrass myself by writing them down here. But that’s not a lot. The rest of the book was made up of (i) things I could nod to, saying yes I already knew that, and (ii) Albert’s paintings which helped hone my critiquey muscles, making me think about what I liked or didn’t like about them. So a bit of value to an experienced artist but I would absolutely not recommend this book as an introduction to beginners.

Score-wise, Albert (or Albert and Anita) get(s) two palettes. Not a book I regret buying but a book that I wouldn’t replace if my studio burnt down. This is my fourth book on soft pastels and Robert Brindley’s book is way outline front, having helped me more than all the other three put together.

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