BERNARD MYERS (1925-2007)
Still life with fruit, flowers and cauliflower
signed B Myers (lower left)
pastel on paper, unframed
sheet: 56 x 76 cm (22 x 30 in)

PROVENANCE:
Artist's Estate

This work is number 1048 from the Bernard Myers Archive

Explaining his approach to working in pastel Bernard wrote: 'Pastel painting and drawing, whether using soft pastel or oil pastel, has an exciting immediacy of dash and boldness; a kind of bravura. So the way I use pastel goes quite against the grain. My system is smooth and tight and rather laboured, with the pastel carefully and slowly applied in distinct patches and layers. I evolved the technique when confronted with the usual artist-teacher's problem: lack of unbroken periods of time necessary for the start-to-finish development of a picture in one go. I needed a medium in which each stage is complete in itself, ready for the next application, without problems with drying, sinking, cracking or running. I found that oil pastels could give a finish close to tempera or encaustic painting, which I exploited to give my works their own identity. My still life studies are of objects found in my studio, around my house, flowers arranged by my wife, and things seen elsewhere. I always work from things seen, but not necessarily set up as a still life in the pictorial sense. I arrange the objects on the canvas to make a picture...' (Bernard Myers, 'Still Life with Pastel' in The Artist, May 1988, p. 14)