Storm Tower

Storm Tower (32" x 40") pastel painting

In honor of our return to Delaware, I am posting this image of one of the two WWII Observation Towers located on the edge of the North Shore beach in Cape Henlopen State Park. . It is almost obligatory that every local artist draw, paint, sculpt or photograph these towers at some point in his/her career, and I did a series of pastel paintings of the towers in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. This particular pastel was made with my old mark making technique - "a travesty" - according to most pastel aficionados because the artist is supposed to rub and smear the pastels together with a chamois or other blending tool. Instead I used the pastels themselves to rub and blend the colors together, and that meant I had to make thousands and thousands of marks with the different colors to make them blend together. It was a very time consuming technique and I later learned to use the sides of the pastels to do the same trick after layering some smoother lighter layers blended the old fashioned way. I especially altered the technique because nobody seemed to understand what I was doing or why I wanted to do it. But, that's another story.

The “Storm Tower” was painted on 32” x 40” museum board, and was sold from an exhibit of the pastel paintings and digital prints of photomontage artworks in the fall of 2001 at the Blue Moon Restaurant on Baltimore Street In Rehoboth Beach. That particular exhibit was hailed by many who saw it as prophetic because I had used “Tower #1”, and “Tower #2” in the titles of many of the pastels and had also put images of airplanes in all of the photomontage prints of the towers.

Tower of the Pyrenees (28" x 18") 2001, photomontage

Folks were wrong. If I had possessed such knowledge, I would have at least tried to warn the appropriate government agencies of the possible attack. Anyway, I especially liked this particular pastel image of Tower #1 because my husband and I often placed our towels near the base of the towers when sunning and swimming at North Shore Beach. This was the view I had as I lay on my back in the summer sun looking toward the top of the tower, though I invented the stormy sky behind the tower in this pastel painting.