A Window Into the Past

Once Covid-19 shut everything down, I became uninspired. I knew I had to figure a way to get out of this rut, so I started thinking about things that made me happy in the past, which were the times I spent at my grandmothers house when I was little boy. So, I reach out to my Uncle Bill who was the patriarch of my large family. This is an original pastel painting of my uncle Bill, a sharecropper, revisiting my grandmother's house, which was his childhood home and place where he raised his own family. This house bares a lot of history for my family. My grandmother had nine children. Every weekend, all of her children and grandchildren would meet at her house and my uncle Bill would cook on the grill and all of the parents and children would go out to the pathway and play kickball and softball. This was the highlight of everyones week. Unfortunately after my grandmother passed away the families stop gathering at the home. We kind of loss connection with each other, because my grandmother was the glue to the family. This is why I intentionally added the disconnected phone line on top of the front porch's roof. My uncle Bill has returned to reconnect with our families past. I sketched the frame of the house with a graphite pencil on Buff colored Pastel Premier, then I used grey, blues, purples and green soft pastels with denatured alcohol to give the house an undertone. Then I lightly filled in the detail with a combination of hard and soft pastels. Once completing the house I drew in my uncle with hard , then softer pastels on top. Then finished the sky, trees, and. grass with soft pastels.