Postcards from the Easel

Recently I had the honor of interviewing Terry Ludwig and Geoff Ludwig of Terry Ludwig Pastels. Terry has been a hero of mine for decades!

As my love of the pastel medium grew, I discovered his amazing square sticks with their beautiful array of colors and the versatility of marks that can be made with them. I was also fortunate to take workshops at their facility with such pastel luminaries as Elizabeth Mowry and Desmond O’Hagan.

 

A bit of history about them before we dive into the interview.

I found the information below on their website and it gives fascinating insight into the development of Terry as an artist and the pastels he created.

 

Terry Ludwig Pastels, LLC is a family owned and run business located in Littleton, Colorado, United States of America. Our family has been creating handmade pastels since 1995.

 

Each pastel is crafted by hand with a broad range of pigments with minimal natural binders. Our process renders highly concentrated velvety pastels. Daily colors are mixed and formed into sticks all by hand using a unique process invented and refined by Terry. Our employees are specially trained in the art of color and quality of soft pastels.

Many years ago, when Terry first started using pastels, he grew frustrated with the limitations of the cylinder shaped sticks. Because of the chalk stick like shape, Terry was unable to achieve the detail and finer aspects of art in his painting, so he went to work himself figuring out a solution. Thus, the first rectangular shaped soft pastel in the world was born. Because of their quality and shape, our sticks deliver thick, broad strokes or thin, precise lines where necessary. The size of our pastels is approximately 1 ½” x ½” x ½”. Because each pastel is handcrafted with unique pigments, size and shape may vary slightly.

Frustrated with the lack of color options available and few choices for very soft pastels, our founder, Terry Ludwig began experimenting with formulas to make his own pastels. Terry’s goal was to create a vast array of color in pastels that were uniformly soft across all densities of hue. One of Terry’s first attempts to broaden the color spectrum was to create more green sticks. As Terry said, “there just weren’t enough shades of green soft pastels to capture nature, so I had to make new colors.”

 

 Throughout the years, Terry and his staff have continued to “see” colors in the world that were not yet captured in Terry Ludwig soft pastels. Terry Ludwig Pastels was the first soft pastel manufacturer in the world to create our famous Eggplant (V100) colored stick. This stick with a deep purple hue is darker than black. Additionally, we created our family of Shades of Nature sticks that offer a muted color family not offered by anyone else. As a result, today Terry Ludwig Pastels boasts over 600 beautiful pastels. The number of pastels offered by TLP greatly changes from year to year as we “see” more colors that need to be created to serve the soft pastel artist market.

 

First, I was curious about Terry’s background in art and what drew him to the pastel medium.

 

Lydia Pottoff: You studied with William Mosby in Chicago. Did you initially work in oil? How did this influence your approach to color and the mixing of color?

Terry Ludwig: I went to art school in Chicago. William Mosby was one of the instructors there. I had an emphasis on drawing skills, (charcoal) and then once we got on with that we switched to oils. I painted in oils for 35 years prior to going into pastel. But you've been in for 22 years. Like you probably know more about it than I do.

 

LP: I doubt it! I majored in drawing in school so pastels were a natural choice for me. I had a detached retina about 23 years ago and almost lost vision in one eye. My husband ended up giving me pastel lessons as a gift to help me heal. For me, picking up a pastel stick was so familiar since it’s somewhat similar to the way you work with other drawing materials. So what led you to fall in love with pastels?

TL: It was Lorenzo Chavez, you've heard that name I think.

 

LP: Of course! I’ve taken a lot of workshops with him, love his pastels.

TL: Yeah, at that time, the Art Students League was just starting and they had a workshop. Mark Daley was one of the instructors too. Mark had gone to the same art school that I had. I chose to go with him to that workshop because I hadn't been real active in art for a while, but that would get me painting again. I was out there quietly with my all oils, you know, they don't make a whole lot of noise. I heard all of this scraping coming from Lorenzo’s easel. He had some hard pastels that he was using and he said, Lud, you gotta try these. So, I blame it all on him.

LP: So how did you get out to Colorado from Chicago?

TL: Well, we bounced from Chicago to Minneapolis to north central Wisconsin. That year we had minus 50° temperatures.  And I came out looking for work, and in the wintertime there's a lot of sunshine. I went back home to Wisconsin and my wife Marie picked me up from the airport and I had a tan. The kids were in the car and they came in a snow storm to get me. She was not happy. So anyhow, I got out here to get away from some of that cold.

 

LP: I can relate to that. It’s a dry cold when it’s cold. People thought I was buried in snow when I moved out here from the east coast. I was reluctant to reveal the truth.

So you started painting with Lorenzo in pastels. Did you then make the switch or did you keep going back and forth between pastels and oils?

TL: Back and forth. Yeah. But I was trying to get information on making pastels. I had some old books that I looked at. Ingredients that they used way back then are pretty much illegal now. I went to a chemical supply store and I told them what I wanted and they said, what are you going to do with that? The old pastel companies weren't in the habit of giving out information. A lot of it I had to try and dig out for myself.

 

LP: Did you use commercial brands then?

TL: Schmincke was around. I had some Rembrandts that I was using and they were much harder than what I wanted mine to be.

 

LP: You wanted something softer, and then you came up with the idea of the rectangular pastel, right? Going to a rectangular pastel was a huge innovation. I read where you got frustrated with the round pastel and decided to develop a rectangular pastel. What was the reaction from the art community? And how quickly did others imitate it?

 

LP: That was brilliant! How long was it before other people started imitating you and making square pastels?

TL: There was one manufacturer back east that had round pastels and they switched them to square and I was like, hmm, I wonder how he came up with that idea.

But you know, it wasn't patented or anything, but yes, there it was.

 

LP: Okay there wasn't a patent on a square shape? It sounds like others weren’t even thinking that way. You were just trying to make a better pastel. With an amazing array of colors.

TL: I knew color from the oil and mixing all that myself. I wasn't trying to copy the other ones that are being made. I was just working from what I knew about mixing oil. It's the same pigment for the most part. And there are binders — we've tried different ones to see which ones work best. It’s basically pigment and a binder. Not all pigments are the same –     some are hard and some of them are really soft and fluffy. You had to work within those to get consistency in a final product.

 

LP: It seems like most of your pastels are really consistent, but there are a few that I can tell are a little bit being softer or harder. I assume it's just the nature of what kind of pigment is in it.

TL: Yeah. And we did a lot of trial and error and heavy on the error part. You have to experiment like that to come closer to what you want.

 

 

LP: So you started experimenting and making them for yourself.

TL: It was several years. There, wasn't just the color thing, but the consistency and color fastness. There are a lot of different avenues that you need to approach and figure out.

 

LP: Well, you don't want to put something out there and have an artist use it without confidence. The materials have to do what they say they are going to do.

TL: And that was important to me. Twenty years ago when I was still using oils, I came down with leukemia. I got serious about the stuff that was toxic. I did not want the people using my pastels to have those kinds of problems either. It was like, I want repeat customers. Yeah. If you kill them off, you know, they won't buy anymore.

 

LP: I was hesitant to ask you any questions about that time of your life. I remember hearing about that early on when I came to your studio for some of the workshops that I did there. You got leukemia, but it was from oil's not pastels?

TL: They couldn't tell me what it was from, but that was before I got into pastels. And I heard rumors around that some oil painters had switched to pastels because of that problem, the solvents and all that. They were concerned about it.

 

LP: You’re a driving force for me to use gloves all the time. I used to paint without gloves. I found some really good surgical gloves that I wear that I can actually grip. That’s the problem with painting    with gloves – just being able to grip the pastel. But you know, I still drop them all the time!