“ My imagery arrives intuitively, neither intended nor preconceived. I work with the means in a sense of exploration and discovery, allowing suggestion, and respecting the mysterious. As in music, painting places me in the indeterminate, evoking fascinations of the unknown.
Currently, gouache on paper with pastel overlays has become an exciting new medium for me, to some degree an extension of the oil on canvas painting process with which I am familiar, but much more immediate. The process of discovery was accelerated, engendering an awakening, and the emergence of new content and form; revealing atmospheric expressions of inner reality. ”
Gouache, or Body Colour combines dry powdered pigments, the same permanent pigments as in oil paint, and precipitated chalk in an aqueous medium, bound with gum arabic. The brilliant opaque quality of gouache arises from the reflecting power of the paint itself. It possesses a certain robust solidity, substance and body, making possible the layering of paint to create a beautifully vast range of pearly effects, with a richly subtle
matte-finish.
Gouache was first employed by ancient Egyptians who used honey to bind their pigments. Widely used by Monks in the Middle Ages for vividly magnificent illuminated manuscripts, gouache is also found in sumptuously ornate religious Persian painting. Utilized by Italian painters in the 15th Century, gouache became popular with the 18th and 19th C. French and Italian Masters. This splendid, opaque impasto I find ideal for modern expressionist effects.
Pastels are dry powdered pigments molded into small sticks, then dried. Soft pastels, those without oil or wax, are the most brilliant in color. A particle of pastel seen under a microscope looks like a diamond with many facets; the interaction of its powdery surface and the refraction of light reflect like a prism, creating the most powerful medium in color and stability.
While forms of pastel have been used since prehistoric times by artists who drew on cave walls, its invention is attributed to the 16th C. German painter, Johann Thiele. Pastels became traditionally accepted in the 18th C. with European court portraiture and were increasingly employed by a galaxy of famous artists from the Impressionist painters of the 19th C. to the 20th C. Moderns. Pastels from the 16th C. exist today, as fresh and vibrant as the day they were painted.
Gouache and soft pastel in combination provide me with an enormous range of color and value particularly suited for my intimate vignettes.
Gregory Stephen McIntosh
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