Speaking Three Artistic Languages at City Hall With Robert Klausing

by Bob Bahr, Prairie Village Arts Council member

Robert Klausing has the skills and vision to pursue an artistic idea in very different directions, thanks to his facility in acrylic painting, pastels and watercolor. These three media handle very differently, with watercolor being a somewhat unruly way of painting with water and pigment wanting to pool and run across the paper, acrylic drying quickly and opaquely, and pastel acting as a hybrid between drawing and painting.

"Buffalo River Crossing," by Robert Klausing, pastel, 26 1/2 x 32 1/2 in.

Parents know that each child needs to be raised differently; teachers know that each student brings a unique set of needs for learning. Perhaps the part of Klausing's personality that allowed him to be a high-school and middle-school teacher and coach for years is the same part of his brain that allows him to smoothly work with various materials.

His pastels jump out at the viewer, partly because of the energy in his strokes with these pigment sticks, and in part because of the vibrancy of pastel's colors. Klausing does move from medium to medium, but he focused mostly on pastel for years for pragmatic reasons. "One of the reasons I got into pastel was because it was immediate," he says. "I didn't have to wait for it to dry or worry about all the processes involved like with oil paints. Anyway, there wasn't the time to spend on a large acrylic or oil painting. I had seen some pastel pieces and really enjoyed them. Pastel has been around for a long time; Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, and Edgar Degas, among others, proved it was a legitimate fine-art medium. I can do one fast if I don't have a lot of time to put into a painting."

"Two Mile Turnaround," by Robert Klausing, pastel, 19 x 22 1/2 in.

"I enjoy the energy of linework, so pastel is very conducive to the way that I like to work," Klausing continues. "Pastel can be very linear. I like to use strokes to suggest form, sort of a tight impressionism. But you can blend pastel with a rag, your finger, et cetera if you want to create a surface that is pristine. I've always enjoyed more of a loose, expressive style. And I am always aware of the visual effects of light and its characteristics, of the effect of light in different conditions. Pastel really lends itself to expressing that light. And there is a visual energy that comes from pastel. I think people respond to that."

While an artist can smudge two pastel colors together, they don't blend the same way as a liquid medium. Instead, pastelists often put different colored strokes from pastel sticks next to each other to allow the colors to blend in the viewer's eye. In oil paint, a similar approach was made by Georges Seurat in the 1880s. Seurat's method, dubbed pointillism, consisted of a painstaking application of dots of color, with all of the colors blending in the viewer's eye. Some modern printing processes utilize a similar approach.

"A Sunday on la Grande Jatte--1884," by Georges Seurat, 1884-1886, oil on canvas, 81 3/4 x 121 1/4 in. Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

A detail of "A Sunday on la Grande Jatte--1884" showing Seurat's pointillism approach, with pure dots of different colors sitting next to each other to blend in the viewer's eye. Note the dots of color in the man's hair, which blend into a dark brown approaching black, and all the distinct colors in the fleshtones.

"If I am painting in acrylic, I can blend those colors ahead of time," Klausing says. "In pastel, I may make hatch marks with a blue, then layer hatch marks of yellow on top to create the green that I want. I have hundreds of colors of pastel so I can get most colors. But if a green is not dark enough, I can use color underneath it to get it darker. When you can't find the color you want in your pastel sticks you have to think about how to make them."

Klausing works on pastel paper that's a neutral beige or light tan. His paper has a lot of tooth to grab the pastel. With care, that tooth allows several layers (Klausing says up to four) to build up before getting slick and full. He starts with hard pastels, sometimes brushing the shapes at this early stage in painting with a bit of mineral spirits to work the pigment into the paper while leaving most of the tooth unfilled, ready for more layers. Softer pastels are applied last, with the delicate pigment sitting on top of previous layers with clean, brilliant color. He sometimes uses pastel pencils at the very end for fine details.

"Fox Creek--Late Afternoon," by Robert Klausing, acrylic, 25 x 37 in.

Painting with pastel sticks is a very direct way to paint--your hand is on the pigment; your hand is directly applying the paint. There is no brush handle to create distance between artist and artwork. It makes a big difference, especially in regard to control. But lately, Klausing has focused on painting with watercolor, the medium of his senior exhibition in high school. "I'm going through a watercolor phase right now," he says. "Pastel is so controlled. The spontaneity of watercolor can carry some of the energy of the painting. So I bounce back and forth between the two media." Acrylic is the middle child, with more control than the mercurial watercolor, and less control than pastel. Klausing says he puts down washes of color in acrylic in a manner similar to how one would in watercolor, then as the painting develops, his strokes become more like pastel marks, albeit with acrylic paint and brush. Watercolor, acrylic, pastel--in a sense, Klausing is trilingual. That's not for the faint of heart.

Wait--we forgot to mention that Klausing also throws clay to create ceramic works of art. Perhaps that's for another day.

"Deepwater--High Water Riffle," by Robert Klausing, watercolor, 28 x 22 1/2 in.