Curator, Samantha Friedman: We’re looking at two works both from 1918. One is a pastel and one is an oil painting. Both of these works have this deep blue form at their base and this series of folds arching over that blue form.
Conservator, Laura Neufeld: Her technique in oil painting and her technique in pastel evolved together. She’s experimenting with how to model these folds almost like drapery. In the pastel, that’s done by making adjacent strokes and blending together different colors. Yellow and green come together to make a shadowed area at the top. Blue and pink together in the lower left area. She talks about how she literally wears the skin off of her fingers because she’s working the surface to really sculpt those transitions between colors.
Samantha Friedman: And in the oil painting, she’s become a little bit more subdued and we see a lot of white added also, which changes the harmony of the color composition.
Laura Neufeld: The addition of white is much easier to achieve in the oil paint than it would be in the pastel, where you might risk colors going muddy. Observing those differences in the color lets us understand the differences between what pastel offers and what oil offers her when she’s making these variations on a composition.