Chalk Pastel 

I love chalk pastels for the intensity of it's pigment and way in which I can seize up a stick of colour and apply it directly to the paper.

It's nature of immediacy and spontaneity corresponds more with the subjective reactions and associations to the subject than the pre-interpretive what, where, how, investigation of it.

In simple terms, the immediacy of pastel work tends to reflect how I feel about an object, whereas the slow processes of watercolour tend to focus my attention on how I perceive/think about a subject.

Although chalk pastel can be used to achieve realism, I am especially drawn to it's facility to build up a physical texture on the page, often scratching through layers of applied colour or embossing into the page.

Working in this way evokes for me sensations of time, it's presence felt in both growth and decay, the accumulative processes of memory and the constructivist nature of building meaning from experience.