https://www.saatchiart.com/en-gb/studio/art/12903327/overview
Medium: Oil Pastel on Paper
Dimensions (approx.):
Artwork: 36 x 38 cm
Framed: 46 x 36 cm
Framed: Yes — sold framed as pictured
Year: 2025
Style: Contemporary Landscape / Measured Impressionism
Surface: Acid-Free Heavyweight Paper
Technical Description
Echoes of Solitude is a fully executed oil pastel work, created through a measured and intentional process. The composition is structured yet emotive, showing rolling hills, a winding path, and layered vegetation. Every element is carefully placed to guide the eye and construct depth without relying on spontaneity.
Medium: High-grade oil pastels have been used exclusively, with no underpainting or additional media. The artist employed both blunt and sharpened edges of the pastel sticks to control texture and line weight.
Layering: Color is built in translucent and opaque layers, using subtle pressure blending techniques rather than smudging. This retains the integrity and vibrancy of each pigment layer.
Perspective & Planning: The path curves intentionally through the composition, pulling the eye from the foreground into a verdant midground and a quiet, layered horizon. Background planes are treated with subdued cools to simulate depth and distance—a classical atmospheric approach achieved purely through pastel.
Color Use: A harmonized palette of natural greens, blues, and warm golden tones evokes early summer. The placement of red and magenta accents throughout the composition is both visual and symbolic punctuation—used sparingly and deliberately to preserve compositional balance.
Philosophical Approach
This work is not an observational landscape, but a reconstruction of memory and emotion through controlled, thoughtful mark-making. The painting suggests a meditative journey—one of returning to stillness, to the structured rhythm of nature untouched by haste.
On Solitude: The single path evokes isolation, not as loneliness, but as clarity. The walk into the horizon is both literal and existential—a quiet call to introspection and presence.
Measured Execution, Measured Thought: As in the act of walking, the artist’s strokes are deliberate, paced, and purposeful. There is no reliance on accident; every shade and edge is consciously placed, reflecting a philosophy of discipline, care, and internal listening.
The Role of Time: Time is not frozen but extended across the breadth of the field. The gradation of light across the landscape creates a sense of day unfolding slowly, echoing the pace of the artist’s process—a visual meditation on patience and perception.
Artist’s Intention and Process
This painting was developed over multiple sessions, allowing each layer of oil pastel to settle and cure before further work was applied. The artist works without references, building the landscape from inner vision and memory. Planning was done with soft preliminary contouring, then built over using direct application of color blocks, refined over time with line corrections and saturation control.
Rather than impressionistic spontaneity, the artist seeks harmony through structure and restraint. The piece is less about capturing a fleeting moment and more about constructing a lasting state of emotional geography—a landscape designed to be inhabited, not just seen.
Laura Bernardeschi Nelson artworld and travels 