March Guest Artist JC Borders

I’ll be driving west along Route 128—our scenic “river road,” and I’ll see the huge slabs of red rock, the purple splashes of varnish, the reflections on the Colorado, and it really grabs me. I have to paint it!

My art career has been a series of stops and starts. In fact my introduction to pastels more than 30 years ago was due to the stops and starts of my business. I was living in the Pacific Northwest and learning to work in oils, when my teacher, Roberta St. Louis, suggested I give pastels a try. With pastels, I wouldn’t need to keep remixing my oil paints when I had some time for my art. I made my first order from Dakota Art Pastels, and it began a lifelong obsession.

I left Oregon, thinking I might like to live in Santa Fe. The dry desert air and the art scene really attracted me. The housing and the land prices, however, did not!  I realized that a small town on the way to Santa Fe did interest me, though. That small town was Moab.

I moved here, designed and built my own home, and started a photo tour business where I shared our area with clients from around the world. After that, I started teaching pastels to a group of artists, sharing my love of the dense color, blending, and light and shade that is possible with holding great hunks of color right in your hand. The Pastel Guild continues on to this day.

I paint in my upstairs studio where I use photos but also create my own improvisations on our wonderful desert geology. I prefer using black, sanded pastel paper that has a gritty texture--or “tooth”— allowing me to stop, erase, and rework many areas of a piece. Sometimes I work on three, four, even five pieces at a time. I can leave a piece for months before starting on it again. The stop-and-start nature of using pastels gives me the flexibility to work on something when inspiration, time, or energy strike.

As a realist and a perfectionist, I work hard to get the light, shade, value, and color for the sense of depth I crave in my landscapes. My influences include the late Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, and the American (and still living) realist master James Bama.

I’m also very picky about color. I would tell my students, “Use any color, but never green!” I seek to blend other colors into subtle greens on my paper, not just use the straight greens the soft pastels in my collection offer. My 20 trays of pastel sticks, soft pastels in a pan format, and jars of pastel pencils offer me endless possibilities to get just the right hue, shade, and feel that I desire.

From the fogs and watery greens and gray scenes of Oregon to the countless bright reds and yellow ochres of the Moab area, pastels continue to enrich my soul throughout the stops and starts in my life.