Your Eyes to the World of Soft Pastel Art
Archive for March, 2012
The Pastel Scream
March 27, 2012
Edvard Munch "The Scream"
Edvard Munch’s celebrated painting The Scream will be up for sale at Sotheby’s in New York on May 2nd. Edvard Munch made four versions of the composition, which has become the embodiment of angst and existential dread. Three are in Norwegian museums and this one, pastel on board, from 1895, is the only “Scream” still in private hands. It is being sold by Petter Olsen, a Norwegian businessman whose father, Thomas, was a friend, neighbor and patron of the artist. This version of the painting is different from the others in several ways. It is the most colorful of the four, and the only version whose original frame was hand-painted by the artist with a poem describing a walk at sunset (“I felt a whiff of Melancholy — I stood / Still, deathly tired”) that inspired the painting. It is also the only “Scream” in which one of the two figures in the background turns to look outward onto the cityscape.
It is estamated it could bring more than $80 million.
Pastel on Board, from 1895.
Size 59×79 cm.
Update after the sale. May 2nd, 2012.
Munch’s masterpice was sold for $119,922,500 / € 91,033,826 (includes buyer’s premium), in an evening where $330,568,550 marked the highest-ever total for an auction of Impressionist & Modern Art at Sotheby’s Worldwide. A group of at least eight bidders showed interest in Edvard Munch’s painting, but it would be an over 12 minutes long battle between two highly determined phone bidders that would settle the final selling price.
Featured Pastel Artist: Barbara Benedetti Newton
March 14, 2012
in Demo, Featured Artists
Barbara Benedetti Newton
Barbara Benedetti Newton was born 1943 in Puyallup, Washington, and attended Art Institute of Seattle. Barbara began her professional art career as a fashion illustrator in 1965. Working exclusively in colored pencil for more than a dozen years, she became one of the masters of the medium and co-authored Colored Pencil Solution Book, published in 2000. In 2002 she began exploring other mediums and has been working primarily in soft pastel since then. Making the transition from a precise, time-consuming, transparent medium to spontaneous, fast-paced, opaque soft pastel has been a journey of discovery. With a change of medium, Barbara also departed from her trademark light-filled still life subjects to impressionistic landscape scenes. Barbara has authored articles in American Artist Magazine, The Artist’s Magazine and International Artist Magazine. Her work has appeared in all editions of the Best of Colored Pencil series and as a feature article in The Pastel Journal magazine. She is past president of the Colored Pencil Society of America, a Signature Member of the Northwest Pastel Society, the Pastel Society of the West Coast, and has been awarded Master’s Circle membership in the International Association of Pastel Societies (IAPS).
Barbara is a very active blogger and has many interesting posts for general public. A pastel demo can be found at the Mighty Art Demos
“For me, painting is a journey of discovery from challenges of mastering the medium to contemplation about my message. I portray natural and man-made objects in a light filled environment. Presenting a variety of relationships is facinating to me – color to form, object to subject, shadow to light. I combine surface characteristics, color, and attention to detail to portray the spare elegance of ordinary objects and everyday scenes through contemporary realism. My most recent work has been creating landscape paintings through the luscious color and buttery texture of soft pastel.”
