Pastine Projects is pleased to present the colored-pencil drawings of Sid Garrison (1954 - 2021).

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In the realm of artistic innovation, Sid Garrison stood as a luminary, renowned for his innovative use of colored pencils that transcended their traditional role. Garrison normally avoided generic labels for his images, but when one recent viewer described them as “Colored-Pencil Paintings,” Garrison accepted the description. With painstaking precision, he applied vibrant hues onto Strathmore paper, building up intricate cross-hatchings layered into a rich waxy surface that invites us to lose ourselves in their captivating depths. The variation of idiosyncratic shapes, vibrant colors, and stippled patterns attract the eye with their spontaneity and lack of premeditation.

Remarkably, after days or even weeks of meticulous labor, Garrison's compositions possess a seamless quality that belies the hand of the artist. Each stroke bespeaks a narrative of spontaneity and unbounded creativity.Far from being mere products of preconception, Garrison's works exude a magnetic allure that eludes facile categorization, beckoning us into a realm of profound aesthetic contemplation.

 

Through his work, Garrison presents to us his inner life as a series of stunning visual tableau vivants.In 2008, Garrison wrote of his finished drawings that they "function like a collection of short stories, linked by compositional decisions that may result in quiet with open spaces, or bursting with stippling or a tangle of contours."

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