Every Sunday for Sunday Visit, Botanical Colors sits down for an interview with a luminary in the natural dye, textile and art world. Grab a cup of tea and settle in to learning about someone you never knew! Catch up on all our Sunday Visits here. This week we sit down with our resident Indigo aficionado, but also pastel expert Brittany Boles of Indigo Fest. We wanted to learn more about what sparks her creativity and what drew her to making her own natural art materials. Read more below about what you can expect from her upcoming in person class on December 7th.
You have been making handmade pastels from your homegrown natural dye pigments and teaching the Art of Pastel since 2019, can you tell us a little bit about what drew you to this medium? How did you first come in contact with using pastels?
As a child, I inherited a box of half-used pastels from my mother along with her paperback “How to Draw and Paint” by Henry Gasser. My mother was crushingly discouraged from following a path to art in her youth, as it “couldn’t be a productive career”, but she kept a hold of a small box of art supplies nonetheless. Opening the pestel box of dust and pieces was a portal for me. I voraciously flipped through the book and tried to imitate every still life and scene I could in one sitting! Pastel was the Better crayon that I didn’t know I had been waiting for my whole childhood! I asked for my own box of pastels that Christmas and began drawing and painting eagerly. My fork in the road as a 12yr old was the privilege to choose between drawing lessons or music lessons, but I chose piano.
In my early 20s, now a full-time piano teacher, I met my best friend, Pam, an incredible artist whose main medium is pastel. We collaborated, her illustrating a song that I composed on the piano. Later when I began growing indigo, I created my first set of indigo pastels for her. Indigo pastel and wisteria vine charcoal featured in portrait of “Mae” by Pam White
What is it about pastels that you love?
There is no intercessory with this medium application- no brush, no pen, just you and pigment. I’m very much in love with process: growing the plant from seed & cultivating relationship, harvesting pigment & creating binders and fillers from foraged and found ingredients. The end product artwork is truthfully always secondary and incidental for me. I also enjoy the forgiveness of pastel and their inevitable breakage & breakdown, which means starting anew!
Can you tell us what we will take away from your upcoming workshop?
My number one aim is always developing source connection. Who made your art tools/how/why, we answer these questions with experiential knowledge. Making your own art medium is the springboard to your next creative vision. It’s one thing to write a song, it’s another thing to build the instrument that you will compose with. You’ll learn to confidently connect the world of pigments and lakes to your pastel box in useful and accessible techniques and how to recycle those bits/ends in your art boxes back into new pastels!
A little birdy told me you also make your own charcoal? Can you tell us a little bit about this process?
Fire and humankind, such an ancient and revolutionary elemental connection, yes? Charcoal is so fun and easy to make! A dyer pal, Aaron Sanders Head, first turned me into charcoal-making. It’s popular with willow and grapevine but I was keen to find my own local softwood. My neighbors wisteria vine regularly dies back and vines fall over our shared fence into the backyard. It’s the perfect soft wood, packed into metal tins, it shrinks to a third of its volume in the coals of a hot fire after about an hour. I adore the curly, glittery charcoal wisps and use them as a direct pigment stick or grind them for pastel/other mediums.
Tell us a little bit about what makes you creatively tick, what inspires you to create?
Source connections are always central to my creative domino: I want to find the seed, the plant, the element, the origin and I want to swim around in that world as long as possible. It’s not really enough for me to stop at making the “thing”, I want to make the tools to make the thing, to make the paint to paint with, I want to grow/forage the plant, etc. I’m really keen to collaborate on projects in community: a local vat, a local vat, local chalk, local pigments, local binders. It comes down to, I need to feel connected to the people and plants around me and share that connection in turn.
We know you as the “indigo doula”, but just from knowing you through the natural dye community, I would say you carry your caring and nurturing energy across all of your mediums. In what ways do you nurture your own creativity?
Watering my own garden literally and figuratively is so increasingly important to me. Continuing my own curious journey with new-to-me plants, new mediums, taking classes, being a beginner, music, poetry, family playtime, ocean therapy, river swims, nurturing communal spaces -all fill my cup. I’ve also settled into the fact that I’m a seasonal extrovert and that when the garden dies back, so I must also. I tend to hibernate pretty hard and reemerge with seeds in the spring. Orienting life and work to sync with the micro-seasonal shifts is always the ultimate goal for sustaining creativity and joy. Teaching is the language through which I’m inspired to translate and hone my craft and I look forward to the creative inspiration that will abound in the Art of Pastel workshop on Dec 7th at Botanical Colors Studio.
