Mary Pritchard

Pastel is the perfect medium for a traveling artist. In recent years, I have painted landscapes from California to Nova Scotia. But my favorite subject matter is within a few miles of my home in Chestertown, in the small towns, family farms, tidewater rivers and marshes of Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

The reality of a working farmyard serves as a springboard to experimentation and exploration—a fascinating combination of shapes and values, light and shadow, the geometry of manmade structures and the textures of fields and trees.

My challenge as a landscape painter is to retain a “sense of place” while creating a new reality that exists on the two-dimensional surface. For me, pastel is the ideal medium to meet this challenge. It offers directness, spontaneity and flexibility as well as limitless opportunities to explore the dynamic interplay between pigment and paper.