Description

Painting with Pastels / Peindre avec des pastels is a short video that begins showing a hand turning a vintage meat grinder attached to an old two-by-four. The action takes place on the rocks of the shoreline of the East River in Dumbo, Brooklyn, looking across to Manhattan. Pastels are placed in the grinder creating a pile of coloured dust on the rock. At one point, the grinder is removed and the pastels are ground into dust directly on the rock using a round stone. The sound of the city is heard in the background. The video images are punctuated with text screens reading:

In my first year of art school, I thought all artists were painters.
I imagined painting blue skies, white clouds and green fields.
Recently, I found five unopened boxes of pastel crayons in my studio.
I remember buying them on my first visit to New York ages ago.
There’s one box of green, three boxes of different blues and one box of white.
Nothing happened as imagined.