SmartFlix: When did you first realize you were interested in art in general?

Lindy C. Severns: One of my earliest memories is of meticulously crayoning inside each white satin leaf on the cover of my parents’ brand new mattress. That pleased me so much, I started on the wallpaper in our tiny rent house. That got quite a reaction from my folks, and it wasn’t over my apparent talent with Crayolas.

I’ve always created. For me, drawing is like breathing, laughing, crying. When I entered first grade, I was shocked to learn that each of my classmates didn’t draw and paint. I felt embarrassed because I could so easily do something they couldn’t. I got over that the first time a classmate passed me a nickel and asked if I’d draw Santa Claus for him.

SmartFlix: Who was your biggest artistic influence growing up?

Lindy: My mother, watercolorist Bettye Phillips Cook. Hands down. Don’t even have to think about that one.

I’m her firstborn, and she poured out creative energy like milk. She spent untold hours drawing with me, painting, sculpting clay. Although she didn’t do much in the way of fine art back then, she made certain art enveloped my little life. She’d draw cartoons on my lunch bags, paint big cutout caricatures for birthday parties. I deduced that the Easter bunny wasn’t real the year she painted all these wonderful miniatures on on all the eggs– I took one look at the level of art in my basket and knew without a doubt my mother was responsible, not some mythical Rabbit with a paintbrush.

After I started school, Mom became art director for the NBC affiliate in Lubbock, TX. She’s self-taught, and she boldly wrote Walt Disney to ask how to do animation. This was back in the fifties, and Disney responded personally and in detail. With my baby sis and me underfoot, Mom then produced a clever series of animated Channel 11 figures that are occasionally still aired. Watching her jump right in like that taught me not to let fear get in the way of creating.

SmartFlix: When did you decide plein air pastels were the right medium for you
and why?

Lindy: I’m outdoorsy, a very tactile person. I touch fruit before I buy it; I feel flowers before I smell them. I don’t wear gloves when I garden; the sensation of dirt slipping through my fingers pleases me. So soft, crumbly pastels are my medium of choice. I’d always rather be out enjoying nature than cooped up inside four walls. Plein air pastels tweak my senses like studio work cannot.

How did I find my niche as a pastelist? Growing up, I worked a lot with colored pencils. I made paper dolls for my sister and for myself; I designed boxes and boxes of elaborate clothes for them. Colored pencils fascinated me (still do) because to use them effectively as a painting (rather than drawing) medium, you must think ten steps ahead of each stroke you put on paper. Actually painting with colored pencils is an intellectual exercise as well as a creative one.

Soft pastels are, to me, a logical progression from colored pencils. I first used them in Mrs. Parker’s high school art class in Midland, TX. My first box contained twelve of Grumbacher’s most popular colors. With that small box, I produced lots of mediocre but passable wildlife pastels. I saw no problem with my limited palette; I’d never seen a serious pastel landscape; for landscapes, I’d simply use oils.

A few years into this dabbling around, my husband gave me Grumbacher’s set of 144 pastels for our anniversary. I wept with joy for all the colors now at my disposal. I took the pastels into the yard, on camping trips. I produced pastel landscapes that weren’t good drawings, weren’t accomplished paintings but were at least reflections of where I’d been. During this period, I enjoyed the process a lot more than I enjoyed looking at my finished work.

Then I saw Albert Handell’s rich, dark, complex pastels. My life, my art changed.
It was like walking into a room full of everything you love, then seeing your name on the door. I studied with him, a lot. Our styles are dissimilar, but it was as if Albert gave me permission to carry what technique I’d learned from my colored pencil work into the shadowy depths of serious landscapes, adding in all I already knew about oil painting. My landscapes, whether in oil or in pastel went from good enough, but to very, very good.

It was years later, only after we retired to Big Bend country that I found myself painting on location again, more and more. The relatively mild weather in the mountains of Far West Texas has a lot to do with that. So does having access to so many special places, vast landscapes a camera just can’t capture. Right thing, right place, right time– pastels, the panorama that is Far West Texas and the Southern Rockies, and day after day spent enjoying what I love to do where I love to do it.

SmartFlix: Your landscapes are so stunning with their detail and bold use of
color. Are landscapes your favorite to create, and if so, why?

Lindy: Yes. I’ve done portraits, figures, wildlife. I do enjoy all of those subjects. I have only done two or three still lifes in my life. (Too still for me!)

But I am a hiker, an amateur naturalist, a lover of nature. Painting landscapes excites my senses in a way that portraiture and wildlife painting can’t match. I am also a pilot, and although I no longer fly (you can’t do everything!) painting bold, complicated skies puts me back in the cockpit, picking my way through a landscape of clouds miles and miles above the earth.

As for the bold colors, that little girl with crayons still lives inside me. Why use one color on the wallpaper when you can use a dozen! (Currently, I have about 800 different colored pastel sticks at my disposal. Give or take a hundred.)

SmartFlix: Name three elements or methods that go into creating a piece that a
viewer of your art may not ever suspect.

Lindy: (1) Intimacy. When I paint a landscape, I mentally and emotionally enter it. I feel the rocks, hear the water, shiver in the snow. In hate people who make art sound like a mysterious process, so forgive me this last statement. Sounds a little out there, but that’s the way I do it. Every landscape is an experience for me, an adventure.
Because I enjoy this process, I rarely paint anyplace I haven’t been or anyplace I don’t know well. From the first sketched stroke, I am physically, soulfully exploring the landscape I paint.

(2) Intellect. Although I paint rapidly, sometimes with such spontaneity I lose track of everything outside my canvas, a great deal of analytical thought and planning go into every painting. Although I allow plenty of room for surprises and happy accidents, from the time I select a subject I must know where I’m going and where I am. Line, shape, pattern. Planning, even on the intuitive level pays off. Flying, you must stay ahead of the airplane, and you certainly can’t lose your ephemeris, your understanding of where you are in the universe. I paint the same way I was taught to fly.

I don’t want my viewers to crash land in an unforgiving, confusing landscape due to my poor planning!

(3) Excitement. If I bore myself while painting, the viewer is sure to be bored, too. Using unexpected color excites me. Finding pockets of light excites me. Playing warm colors against cool colors, weaving light into shadow excites me. Making things look real through illusion excites me.

SmartFlix: What are the supplies and tools necessary for you to create one of
your beautiful landscapes?

Lindy: I use (only) Kitty Wallis Museum grade sanded pastel paper. I use the museum grade rather than the professional grade not only to assure my collectors that their painting will last but also because it takes water, alcohol, Turpenoid better than the also excellent but lesser grade paper.

Because my landscapes are real places, I do a very light, very rapid sketch underneath to tag landmarks and set my composition. For this I (usually) use one of the following:

- Conte or Carb-Othello pastel pencils, lightly sketched on as a line drawing, then melted into the paper with turp substitute or rubbing alcohol, whatever is handy. I use pastel pencils as a general line sketching tool, then carefully brush the alcohol or turp into each line to turn it into paint

- Nupastel sticks blocked in warm/cool tones and lightest/darkest values. I use these when my subject contains bold value changes and not too much line detail. Alcohol seems to work best with Nupastel sticks, and it dries faster, making it my choice for plein air painting when time is critical to a successful painting. No blending, just extremely light color blocks to indicate where shapes change value.

- Watercolor pencils traced with a very fine coating of water for intricately detailed drawing, such as close ups of plants, flowers, or complex clouds.

None of these are underpainted, just lightly sketched on.

I base my palette around a full set of Rembrandt’s medium soft pastels, heavily supplemented with Schmicke’s softer pastels, some Sennilier (so soft, they are scary to touch!) dark-darks, a few Terry Ludwig darks that my painting friend Bob gave me and that I’ll probably add to, and those old Grumbacher sticks that got me going.

In my studio, I keep all these different sets in Roz aluminum pastel cases, lined up on a long table beside my easel. Each case contains either darks, lights, or midtones and is further divided into warms, cools, and finally, hue, regardless of brand. This hodgepodge system probably makes pastel manufacturers cringe, but it allows me to think, “mid-tone warm brown” and reach for one almost without having to look.

For my plein air escapes, I follow the same filing-by-value system, only with smaller sticks in 6″ Roz plastic pastel boxes. I have one carrier of six boxes for lights, one for mid-tones, one for darks, and I carry all three of these in a canvas tote. I should go smaller. But what colors to part with?

I keep a French easel and a studio easel set up in the studio. For plein air, I recently treated myself to a Soltek easel and it has proven worth the money and then some. I keep its backpack stocked with tablets of Wallis paper and sketching tools, plus pimento jars of alcohol, water, turp,, plus sunscreen and a big rain poncho, just in case.

SmartFlix: Do you prefer creating your pieces from life, or from a picture? What
are the challenges of each?

Lindy: Until I did The Colors of Water, a plein air piece that treated me to every hardship known to plein air pastelists and then some, I’d have immediately answered, “from a photo”. But COLORS has a raw, dangerous yet exhilarating, suspenseful quality I’d never be able to capture from a picture, even if I’d stood there in the rain and lightning and taken it myself. But man, was I uncomfortable (and a little scared!) while painting it!

Photos (I only paint from my own photos, or from my husband Jim’s unless it is someplace I really, really know) are great tools, and make life as an artist so much more comfortable. But some places just don’t photograph with the drama of the original location.

The danger in painting from photos is that you can easily get a beautiful reproduction that is mimicry but not art. Painting what you know can remedy this, but the artist must be constantly aware that the viewer expects to see past the image.

Western art critic Michael Duty, (my favorite critic because he’s also one of my collectors) wrote that a great painting tells a story on many levels. Plein air painting is thrilling, like telling ghost stories around a campfire, while using photo references is more like holing up in an attic to write an epic novel. Ideally, an artist will combine elements of both to produce one great campfire epic.

SmartFlix: What advice could you give to someone who wants to start using
pastels for the first time?

Lindy: Pastels, at least the way I use them, are unforgiving. So if you are starting out, look on each painting as a journey, not a destination. (If you use Kitty Wallis paper, you can turp over less-than-happy paintings and reuse the paper again and again.) Smaller isn’t necessarily easier. I recommend the 12″ x 18″ pads– gives you enough room to express most subjects without being intimidating. The 9″ x 12″ pads are also great if you are an accomplished draftsman, confident in your composition.

I would definitely watch a video by any pastel artist whose work you admire. (The unwritten advantage of DVD’s is that you don’t feel the pressure to produce a masterpiece the way you do in a clinic. Kudos to Smartflix for making anonymous masterpieces possible!) Watching an accomplished pastelist at work will feed you. You don’t have to eat it all at one sitting, either. Take what you want from it, write down one technical goal, then go paint. And, paint. Then, rent another video. Write down another goal. Then paint twice as much as before because you know twice as much now. And so on, venturing farther and farther along your journey until you have that sense of ephemeris I talked about. Once you have that, every time you take a clinic or rent a DVD you’ll be seasoning your expertise, including out of it only what you need to make your next painting better. You only learn what you’re ready to learn. So you’d might as well expose yourself to greatness.

Don’t confuse materials for ability. A closet full of art supplies is a fun thing to have. A shoebox full of half-sized pastel sticks is all you need to start and to continue for quite some time. Many manufacturers sell small sets of half-sticks, landscape colors only, etc. If you can afford to drop a few hundred dollars, choose a brand of medium soft pastels and buy their set. But until you paint awhile, you’re really not going to know what you need. (I have portrait-based reds I haven’t used in years, but I go through my blues like popcorn at a movie). I recommend you get color charts from each leading manufacturer, and purchase additional sticks as you need them. Then add a set selected toward your preferences. You will ultimately end up with more colors that way, but get to pay as you go!

I could talk about laying down darks before lights, light strokes to keep from filling the tooth of your paper, feathering with pastel pencils or vine charcoal, but that gets into the realm of technique. Rent a DVD!!!

If I could give only one sentence of advice for a fledgling pastelist, it would be DON’T SPRAY YOUR PAINTING WITH FIXATIVE. All sorts of bad things can happen if you do. Store your finished pastels upright between sheets of glassine, or mat them so they don’t rub against each other. Whatever. Just don’t spray!

SmartFlix: Are there any DVDs you rented from SmartFlix that really helped you
to advance your skills? If so, which ones?

Lindy: This may confuse you since we’re talking about pastels, but I rented Albert Handell’s PAINTING MYSTERY FALLS set twice in the same month. It is an oil painting demo. Albert’s oils and pastels have no variance in style. They just get there different ways, as do my own oils and pastels. I’d been doing small pieces, and I felt the need for a crash refresher in value and composition before tackling a 30″ x 50″ oil landscape. The unexpected learning experience came in watching Handell use transparent turpentine washes, which is a technique I’d never seen before. I use transparent washes in all my oil paintings now. It cuts the painting time in half and yields some of those exciting surprise passages I talked about earlier.

SmartFlix: What three qualities in a person (aside from talent) are most
important if someone wants to become a full-time professional artist?

Lindy: (1) Discipline. You have to paint, perhaps not daily (I don’t paint daily) but regularly, and no matter what. Life will try to interfere. Don’t let it. If you have to be in the mood to paint, you are dooming your art to hobby status.

(2) Business sense and good manners. I count myself lucky to be equally right and left brained (although my husband will dispute that statement.) I managed a small business for several years and that experience has made dealing with my gallery and collectors, as well as marketing myself so much easier. If you are a pure right-brained creator, either read a lot of articles and books on the business aspects of art or enlist some loving soul whom you trust explicitly to do the left-brained stuff for you. Absent-minded artists who care only about their art are generally starving artists.

Good manners are essential. You are providing both a product (your art) and a service (marketing yourself and your art) to your clients. If they pay big bucks for your painting, they expect a big smile and warm handshake in return. Not to mention a Christmas card.

(3) Self- esteem. If you don’t believe you deserve to create, you won’t create. If you don’t produce work to please yourself, you’ll please no one. You are an artist, a special genius. You’d better believe you exist to use that genius or you’ll never really find your ephemeris, your very unique place in the universe. (An old flight instructor at Simuflite taught me that word/concept and I love it because it says so much!) Like yourself and at least part of the world will like your art.

SmartFlix: What is your favorite piece of your own work, and why?

Lindy: You finally caught me speechless. I don’t think I have a lifetime favorite. Every finished piece represents a different part of me from a different time in my life. We live in our RV these days, and currently on display is a large Handell original, plus my work: a shady green pastel landscape of my then-baby brother on his first fishing trip in the Rockies, a pastel miniature of a kitten who later sired a whole dynasty of yard cats, a small oil of my husband backpacking across a mountain peak at sunset, and a pastel of rocks and a stream, a different, softer view of the same rocks my brother had fished on. All are old paintings I won’t part with because they mark a progression of my abilities as well as my life. I paint what I love. Maybe that’s why I can’t pinpoint a favorite. (We have an unusually well-decorated fifth wheel!)

SmartFlix: Which piece was the most fun for you to draw, and why?

Lindy: Most recently, I had fun doing a 24″ x 36″ landscape of the Chihuahuan Desert floor in Big Bend National Park. The desert gives way to the magnificent Sierra del Carmen range across the Rio Grande in Mexico. This piece was fun for me because of the less restrictive size (24″ x 36″ is rather large, as pastels go). I was free to draw in details impossible in a 9″ x 12″ format. I did it in my studio, but it felt like a plein air experience because I’ve spent so much time in Big Bend. Every time I stepped up to the easel to paint, I felt like I was out hiking on vacation.

SmartFlix: Do you have a favorite pastel artist?

Lindy: Albert Handell. He has taken pastels to a whole new level. His work has excitement tucked all through it.

SmartFlix: Briefly describe the process of creating a piece, from choosing its
content to framing it.

Lindy: Out in the field or thumbing through photos, my subject selection is a gut-reaction. A subject must strike a chord of inspiration in me, a sense of wanting to claim its essence and make it part of who I am.

In my plein air pastel THE COLORS OF WATER, I started out interested in distant clouds. I was painting in one of Handell’s mentoring workshops, an intense, non-instructional marathon painting experience. All week I’d been painting things I didn’t necessarily want to paint, morning and evening. I was hot, tired, riddled with insect bites. I wanted to paint a storm to match my mood. But the Rio Grande gorge was off my other shoulder, and the low sun started doing all the magnificent things the sun can do to rocks at sunset. I love that gorge. So three or four minutes after stepping from my truck, I was setting up my Soltek easel facing the gorge instead of the clouds. I used a tablet of 12′ x 18″ Wallis paper.

Light had attracted me. So using Nupastels, I quickly blocked in the lightest light and the darkest dark of the gorge’s rim. Mentally composing and measuring, I sketched the rest of the landscape outward from that zone. I fixed my sketched lines to the paper with alcohol.

Ten or fifteen minutes into the painting, the clouds I’d originally been interested in started moving over the gorge, which brightened my mood immensely. I drew in the storm clouds, then filled in the sky with soft pastels. I generally complete the sky at this stage before going on with the rest of the landscape. Trouble was, the sky was changing faster than I could paint.

Three of us were painting in the general area; both their easels blew over, scattering pastels through sagebrush. Oh my. I collapsed my easel, sank to the asphalt and held the easel in my lap as I worked on making the darkening sky even more ominous. By now, the wind was blowing so hard in front of the storm I had to hang onto both canvas and easel while I painted the detailed contours of the gorge and laid in lines of light. I chose what mattered to me and got it on paper, fast. I had perhaps two hours, total, of work and of set-up time in the painting when lightning and rain forced me to pack it up. Quickly.

I work from a very loose, bold composition, refining and refining as I paint. So two hours doesn’t leave much to show for my efforts, although I know at this stage where I’m headed. I brought the thus-far unremarkable painting home to the studio.

Had it been a more complicated landscape or had the scene not been burned into my memory, I would’ve pulled out the photos I took and referred to them at this point. But in this case, another two or three hours at my easel was all it took to complete the painting from memory.

I watch for my husband’s reaction to a finished piece. He got the WOW look I love to see on his face. I also showed it to my studio partner Roxa, my other main critic. Another WOW. So I photographed it, then packed it up and ran it over to my gallery, a ninety mile drive round-trip. I don’t like to let something I’ve finished sit around too long or I get tempted to go back and rework it, which is usually a mistake.

Gallery owner Keri had another WOW reaction. So, I left it with her. She selects my frames. I don’t even voice my opinion. I paint. She knows how to package what I paint to sell.

SmartFlix: What methods of marketing your work have proven to be the most
successful?

Lindy: Gallery representation has skyrocketed my sales. I now live in an art market, not one of Santa Fe/Taos status but a significant market nevertheless. So after we moved here, I visited area galleries without confessing that I was an artist. Kiowa Gallery in Alpine felt like home to me, so that was my first choice. I printed out an updated color brochure and professional business cards, left them with the gallery manager. It took three weeks to get an appointment with the gallery owner. Persistence and self-confidence, plus something professional to leave with them paid off as much as samples of my work, and I signed a contract with the gallery for exclusive area representation. We communicate about sales and my future work, weekly,

I keep my brochure updated (I self-publish all my marketing materials on my photo-quality printer.) Besides keeping the gallery supplied, I leave brochures anyplace that has a piece of my art, and I check the supply at these locations regularly. I enclose a brochure in correspondence with business associates, suppliers, doctors, etc. Just so they know what I do.

I print notecards and greeting cards featuring reproductions of my paintings. I scan small paintings or make prints from digital photos. On the back, I list my name, mailing address, email address and website. I sell these cards to the gallery and place them on consignment in locations popular with tourists. When a painting sells, I send a thank-you on a card featuring that painting, plus a few cards for the collector’s use. I use my own cards instead of buying them for friends and relatives. It is more personal, and lets everyone know I’m for real.

I designed my website, lindyseverns.com rather than hiring someone to do it for me. I need to be able to update it myself, regularly. Although I can sell paintings and cards off the site, its main purpose is to give me credibility and a broader audience for my work. And it invites collectors inside my virtual studio, lets them get to know me better.

The learning curve was a steep one–I am not a computer geek– but worth it. (Godaddy.com hosts my site, which I developed using their program WebsiteTonite. I highly recommend both the company and their very patient and articulate tech support.)

I would imagine SmartFlix even has DVD’s to assist in website design!

Visit Lindy’s website to view more of her incredible work at lindycseverns.com
Check out our vast selection of instructional DVDs on Pastels & Charcoal.