The Soft Edge of Thought : On painting with Pastels

Theo Chronis, 2015

There is something in the dust.

Before concept, before image, before composition there is the feel of powdered pigment between fingertips. Soft pastels are not just a tool for me; they are a zone. A fragile terrain between painting and drawing, form and atmosphere, touch and surface. I return to them obsessively. Fetishistically, even. Not for what they depict, but for how they behave. For how they fail to behave.

I first reached for soft pastels as a student, seeking immediacy. Oils were slow, noble, heavy with history. Pencil was precise but anxious, all outline and control. Pastels offered something else. They bypassed technique. They responded directly. There was no buffer between thought and surface, only motion and residue. Mark as dust. Colour as breath.

In the years since, this initial instinct has deepened into method. Pastels are now a recurring presence across my hybrid practice not as a traditional medium, but as a conceptual material. They function at the boundary of control. They can be directed, but never entirely. Their softness resists closure. Their fragility resists permanence. They smudge, blend, crumble. They stain skin. They resist erasure. These qualities are not limitations. They are what make the medium alive.

What attracts me to soft pastels, again and again, is their double nature. They belong to both drawing and painting and to neither fully. Like drawing, they begin with the line. Like painting, they dissolve into mass. One gesture can assert an edge or dissolve it. With enough layering, the surface becomes almost painterly. But it never loses that granular proximity to the substrate: paper, board, even primed canvas. They remain dry, unbound, unstable.

This instability is central. My work deals with perceptual ambiguity, thresholds, the failure of the image to resolve into certainty. Pastels are structurally aligned with that aim. Their marks can be sharp, but they blur at the edges. They invite softness. They create halos. An image made in pastel is always in flux. It shifts with distance, with light, with touch. It contains motion even in stillness.

There is also an intimacy to the medium. You do not paint with pastels. You hold them while they paint. There is no brush, no intermediary. The pigment is pressed directly against the skin. There is a bodily knowledge to the process a tactility that activates memory. It’s almost primal. Like ash. Like soil. Like makeup. The act of drawing with pastel feels close to ritual. The fingers become stained with colour. The studio fills with suspended dust. Time compresses.

This material closeness mirrors a conceptual one. My works often emerge from the tension between figuration and abstraction the moment where a form almost appears, then disappears again. Pastels are ideal for staging that kind of uncertainty. They allow for accumulation without rigidity. They reward hesitation. You can suggest a face without fully declaring it. You can build flesh from vibration alone.

Many of my past pastel works begin not with a subject, but with a surface, a toned ground, a stain, a gesture. The figure is something I approach slowly, indirectly, through layers. I am not interested in constructing bodies, but in suggesting presence. In my process, the line is often less important than the atmosphere. The weight of shadow. The temperature of skin. The emergence of form through resistance. Pastels allow this. They welcome uncertainty. They do not fix the image; they let it hover.

This is also where pastels differ from digital media, which I use in parallel. In Photoshop or AI tools, there is an infinite undo. A clean history. A logic of reversibility. Pastels deny this. Their decisions are permanent or rather, they mutate. You can scrape back, blend over, erase partially. But there is no true reset. This forces a kind of commitment. Each gesture carries risk. Each mistake becomes part of the surface. It is an ethic of presence.

There is also a sensuality that I do not shy away from. The colours of soft pastels -especially high-pigment brands- are luminous in a way no screen or print can match. Their matte, velvety surfaces trap light. They breathe. The experience of seeing a pastel drawing in person is deeply material. It seduces the eye, not through gloss, but through softness. Through nearness. It is, in a way, the opposite of digital simulation not more “real,” but more felt.

I sometimes think of soft pastels as image-memory. They resemble the way we actually perceive not in clear lines, but in gradients, smears, afterimages. They are the medium of dreams, of sensation before clarity. When used on toned or rough paper, they echo cave walls. They feel ancient. And yet, they can be electric, contemporary, immediate. This duality -of primal dust and present intensity- makes them uniquely positioned for the kinds of questions I ask in my work.

There is, of course, a practical challenge. Pastels are delicate. They require fixative, careful storage. They don’t scale easily. They don’t translate well into reproduction. They resist commodification. But again, this resistance is part of their allure. They are a reminder that art is not information. It is material. And sometimes that material should be allowed to remain volatile.

My use of pastels is not about nostalgia. Nor is it about virtuosity. It is about finding a medium that behaves the way I think. A medium that is always between states. Between drawing and painting. Between precision and haze. Between form and dissolution.

I do not believe in mediums as identities. I work across oil, sculpture, AI, installation. But I return to pastels when I need to be close to the edge of the image. When I need to feel the threshold. When I want the act of making to be as fragile and irreducible as the thing being made.

There is something in the dust. A kind of truth. A kind of longing.