A Bold and Impressionistic Pastel Aesthetic
A Bold and Impressionistic Pastel Aesthetic
Maria Marino has found a way to express her feelings freely about the landscape and her passion for pastel.
By Robert K. Carsten
Maria Marino likes the push the envelope, especially with art materials. “When it comes to applying pastel to paper, I’ll push it further and further to a point — even if it fails — because I want to know what my pastels and surface can and cannot do,” she says. “Sometimes I don’t think people push the medium far enough; there’s always so much more to explore.”
This pioneering spirit informs Marino’s pastel aesthetic: a combination of bold impasto textures, impassioned mark-making, and sumptuous, intuitive color.
A Need for Pastel
Having practiced interior design for 20 years, Marino decided to make the leap to becoming a full-time artist in 2015. This wasn’t the first time the artist made a career-changing decision. Marino first attended a small college and majored in illustration, but left for personal reasons. Years later, she decided to resume her training, this time at the prestigious Maryland Institute College of Art. There, she majored in interior design — a course of study that combined both applied and fine arts. It was a program that required her to be “all in,” she says.
“Although my daughter was just five years old, I took 18 credits, working 25 to 30 hours a week. It was difficult, but it was something deep in my heart that I wanted to do, not just for myself, but for my parents. I wanted to make them happy. They were immigrants from Athens, Greece, who strongly believed that it was important for their children to have a good education. Unfortunately, they both passed away before I graduated.”
A Strong Impression
Marino has always had a fondness for drawing and painting. “In fact, when I was a child, I drew all over my mother’s walls,” she says. And she still keeps an active sketchbook today. “When I was 16, my mother bought me a full set of Rembrandt pastels. She was the person in my life who encouraged me to draw and paint. Although she wasn’t an artist, she considered the arts important. Somehow she always knew what I needed and that creating art made me happy.”
Marino remembers her mother taking her to a wonderful art supply store in nearby Silver Spring. She’d buy her anything she needed there — “within reason.” This is how she came to try pastel. “The immediacy of pastel, the incomparable color saturation — it just bowled me over and completely won my heart,” she says.
Color By Brute Force
To achieve her impressionistic effects, bold color, and overall pastel aesthetic, Marino avoids blending with her fingers; she feels it dulls the brilliant quality inherent in an untouched pastel surface. Instead, seeking the glow of color and impasto texture achieved in some oil paintings, the artist achieves a vibrancy of color and intense, textural quality by what she calls “brute force.”
“I go through a lot of pastel,” she says. “I pound it onto the surface. For example, I’ll break a Diane Townsend Terrages pastel so I get these craggy edges. Then I’ll hit the surface with it in a quick whip of the hand. I’ll get beautiful, calligraphic strokes. What I like especially about the Terrages pastels is that the color sits more in some places than others; it creates this beautiful saturation of color. I’ve noticed that certain colors have more grit than others. It’s interesting to see how the pigment reacts to a little bit of force. I’m not one just to lightly graze the surface.”
An Intuitive Approach
Ever vigilant about the luminous quality of pastels, Marino resists using fixative. To protect her paintings, she has them framed without mats, using spacers and anti-reflection museum glass.
The exquisite color she accomplishes doesn’t come directly from her reference photos or even from the subject in front of her. “If I see a certain green, I may use a completely different color. For me, it’s about temperature and adjacent colors, and how they react with one another,” says the artist. This intuitive approach to color is freely imparted in Song of the Trees (top of this article), which she painted from a photo she took during a trip to California with her husband. “The light was hitting these California oaks so beautifully that they were just shining. It looked like they were on fire.”
More subtle, but no less exploratory and exhilarating color-wise, is Falls on the Hudson, which is derived from photos taken near the New Jersey Palisades after a rainstorm. Marino played her color against a sienna-toned Sennelier La Carte surface to set the mood for the work. “I first placed the mass where the water is falling using a Ludwig dark eggplant color. Then I put in the blue, which was meant to denote other planes,” she says. “Then I placed the lighter purple, providing a third layer. It’s the dichotomy of those colors, the blue and the purple, that sets up the platform for the falls. I used Townsend, Ludwig and Sennelier off-whites to create the fresh, sparkling quality of the flowing water.” Her exceptional use of color and palpable mark-making qualities charge Marino’s paintings with extraordinary energy and emotion.
Impassioned Impasto
Marino depends on her pastels — typically Ludwigs, Senneliers (in half, whole, and jumbo sticks) and Giraults — to achieve beautiful variations of surface. “I enjoy the buttery quality of Terry Ludwig pastels, which I refer to as ‘little rectilinear units.’ Their edges are so beautiful to work with. I often use them in the foreground when I want beautiful mark-making,” she says.
She finds Senneliers “ultra-buttery,” particularly the yellows and yellow ochres, which offer a “creaminess” not unlike that of oil paint. “I do have to handle them delicately, as the sticks can crumble more easily,” she says. “I really love their jumbo sticks — their large format offers me the ability to achieve a myriad of painterly marks. I’m a passionate person; I want to enjoy the experience of painting, and I want my subject to reflect this and come alive. So, when I pound the surface with these jumbo sticks, the pastel smears, creating areas of thick and thin that energize the dimensional quality on the surface.”
With Force
Marino supports her surface with one hand while striking it — often starting from 1 foot away — with her pastel stick. Thus, her physical approach requires surfaces that can tolerate a forceful application and hold many layers of pastel. Her favorites are Multimedia Artboard’s white 320-grit Pastel Artist Panel, 320-grit UART Pastel Board and Sennelier La Carte Pastel Card. “La Carte can’t take as many layers of pastel for me as UART can, so I have to be certain of what I want to do before I begin on that paper. I can’t have what I call a ‘sleepy eye,’ ” says Marino. “I especially like Multimedia Artboard for my plein air work. The surface is a very pristine white, and it’s well-suited for my watercolor underpaintings. It can take a beating.”
Whether working en plein air on a small scale or in the studio on a large format, Marino typically sketches her subject with charcoal first and then does a watercolor underpainting (except on La Carte). She uses this light, not-too-saturated wash to establish her color key and to break up the light surface, leaving some of the white or light color of the surface showing through.
Inspired by Textiles
For her plein air color studies, she’s fond of a 6-inch square format. Even in these small works, Marino infuses much physicality and expression, as seen in Port in Honfleur and Veil of Light. “The small size lends itself well to working somewhat abstractly,” she says. “It’s not laborious, so my marks are fresh and clean. I’m able to get distance and weave color quickly within that small platform.”
Marino uses the analogy of weaving throughout her pastel color application, as she finds inspiration in her memories of beautiful textiles, especially from England and Italy, which she also incorporated in interior design projects for clients.
A Personal — and Physical — Process
The artist often paints larger works in her “not-too-large, but not thimble-sized” basement studio where she has three easels set up: one for oils, another for drawing and a third, a Santa Fe easel with a dust collector, for her pastels. She keeps more than 2,800 pastels at hand, mostly arranged by color and value, all in boxes “stacked like soldiers,” she says. “The amount of pastels I have is ridiculous. I don’t go on vacations, I buy pastels!”
The artist has found another painting tool in music — from classical pieces by Chopin and Vivaldi to the rock stylings of the band Yes — which she blasts in her studio. “When I hear the music, I see color and I can taste the saturation,” she says, “The music kicks it into another gear. Then it’s like I instinctively know what a painting needs, and the process just goes and goes until I’m physically exhausted.” She seldom finishes a larger painting in one session. “If I get too tired, my hand gets lazy and I’m more prone to making mistakes,” she says. “It all becomes very personal and physical for me; that’s why I don’t teach — it’s exhausting.”
One can imagine the labor put into Marino’s Mears Marina — Eastport, with its descriptive mark-making and intuitive color notation. “The boats were lined up, and if I drew them hard edge to hard edge, it would’ve made a boring painting,” she says. “My photo suggested a kind of liquid quality to the atmosphere, so I tried to capture the humidity that we have here in Maryland during the summer months, and how it permeates onto the shell of the boats and dips down to the water.”
A Multitude of Strokes
A multitude of strokes in a dominantly cool palette contrasted against a sienna-toned surface proficiently capture the beauty of Monet’s water gardens in Early Spring Morning, Giverny. “I wanted an effect like that of Paul Signac [French; 1863-1935], with lots of what I call ‘digits of color’ to express the gorgeous light there,” she says.
When painting en plein air, the artist usually works no larger than 12×16 inches; going larger would take more time and, as she puts it, “If you lose that light, you’re a goner.” Soliloquy 2 — Tiber River, painted during Maryland’s Ellicott City “Paint It” plein air event, attests to Marino’s observational skills and rapid recording of the light. Here the purples were mostly done with Ludwigs and the creamy marks with Senneliers.
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