This is a small pastel study I painted at Holy Wisdom Monastery last month when their apple trees were in bloom.

This is a picture of a pastel I painted last week during the Beloit Plein Air Event for Friends of the Riverfront. It needed a few

corrections  before I framed it but this was what I was able to paint in the riverfront park en plein air.  I painted on Pastelmat which is a French paper made especially for pastels; it has a smooth surface that has a surprising amount of tooth and allows underpainting with water or solvents or alcohol. I often do an underpainting with hard pastels and then use alcohol to wash it in because it dries quickly.

 It was a very well organized event with 40 participants; mostly regional artists but one came from as far as Ontario.  Each participant can enter 2 paintings and they will be on display and for sale from 5 -  8 pm Friday June 14 and 9 - noon on Saturday June 15 at the Hendricks Center for the Arts, 409 Pleasant St. in Beloit.. The event also offered 2 workshops and I took the one in watercolor with Gordon France a Chicago artist and it was excellent.  It was a pretty exhausting week but fun and certainly challenging artistically and physically.  Looking forward now to sketching Sunday at the new Brittingham Boat Rental & Concession stand at Brittingham Park.