What Style?

This pastel drawing ‘Nude Sitting on Table (2011) (sold)’ is a kind of impressionist I guess. People around me also mentioned realism and art deco. I was inspired by art deco style nudes from the 1920s and 1930s myself and so I can relate to that one. However, I’m not sure myself still. In the past I faced similar difficulties categorizing my art as an ‘ism’. Surely that is not the primary task for an artist. However, I am forced to put labels on my oils and drawings on a variety of websites. As such I can be found quickly but it’s a bit tedious, that’s for sure! After all, we artists always try out new things that build on previous styles and isms. Do you have a good idea what classification this hatched strokes style deserves?

Back to Front

This may surprize you but this pastel is the first one in 7 years. In between I was still mastering my oil painting skills. There was this gallery Square Circle in Voorburg, Netherlands where I held a student’s exposition. One day I was suppost on a Sunday and it wasn’t very crowdly. That is when I happened to have some pastels and paper with me and start sketching again. Since then I quite got the hang of it and I made a lot of pastels the following years. An example is ‘Nude Leaning Forward (2011) (sold)’. Another reason for making these is that I was running on an empty pocket. Those art deco photos also mostly are royalty-free and they sell very well, especially in the U.S. and China. This pastel even was in the Flowerport Exhibition in 2012 in Shanghai, China.

Musée d’Orsay

When I was a teenager I went to Musée d’Orsay. There I was quite annoyed to see Edgar Degas was a better draughtsman than me. I took good notice of what he was up to though. I liked his hatched strokes and try to emulate them. For some reason I hatched in an angle of approximately 45 degrees from the moment I left Orsay. Somehow it felt better than Degas’ vertical ones. Now I see Degas is a daft prick because he used charcoal grids. I don’t because I do believe in solely drawing and painting according to my own observation. Someone must have catched my drift much later because I sold it to a dutch collector eventually.

Click here to read about the sale of this art work to a dutch collector.

Pastel drawing on Canson Mi-Teintes paper (50 x 65 x 0.1 cm)

Artist: Corné Akkers