On Tuesday evening, Bloomington residents with a taste for art gathered at the Venue Fine Art & Gifts to watch Jo Baum demonstrate her craft of pastel painting. She presented to the audience surrounded by her pastel landscapes.
“Jo cold called us off the street and said she loved the Venue and wanted to have her work here,” said Gabriel Colman, curator of the Venue. “We host art education series, and we reached out to her proactively knowing she had experience explaining her work.”
Baum has been painting with pastels for four years now and was previously making oil paintings.
“I grew up surrounded by art,” Baum said. “My grandfather was an artist. My mother used to take me to art museums, and I was drawn to the impressionists.”
Baum said she could not draw to save her life and that the only C she ever received in college was in drawing. Nevertheless, she persisted. Baum stressed that the way she painted and used pastels was not the way everyone used them.
Baum brought three canvases with her in different stages of completion. The first she had been working on for a few days while the others were examples of paintings in values of pink or a mixture of colors. She explained she used pinks and oranges for sunny days and purples and greys on cloudy days.
“I got to a point last night where I hated it,” she said. “But my instructor always said he had a similar problem, and if you liked it before just wait 10 minutes or two years because you will like it again.”
Baum said one of the bonuses of working with pastels is that there were no mistakes. She was unhappy with the piece she was bringing to demonstrate, but when she looked at her work the next morning, she was able to remove some colors and get the perfect color she was looking for.
“It has even changed from bringing it over here,” Baum said. “It lost some color here, and now it looks like there is a path to the barn. I ended up getting something I was not expecting.”
Baum pointed to one of her many paintings on the wall, a detailed scene of a forest in winter, she had been so unhappy with the way it was turning out she took it out to the garbage can and brushed all the color off and started over.
Baum referred to the painting of the forest and others of her works several times throughout her demonstration as she pointed out differences in style, technique and color.
Ultimately the piece was left unfinished, but Baum had shared much of her experience and some of her tricks when painting with pastels, leaving the audience with new techniques to try when looking at a pastel painting or even making their own. Recognizing pastel paintings can be difficult, Colman said it has been a lot of fun having Baum’s work on hand and seeing people’s reaction to it.
