PAMELA HAMILTON
Interview SUMMER 2021

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i like to paint anything I can personally connect with--nature, flowers from my garden, sunlit garden paths, dramatic skies, birds & animals, and my grandchildren.

Colors and Versitility of Subjects

“Fuchsia 2" - Pastel - 12x5.5 “This started out as a demo on a scrap piece of paper and turned out to be a nice little piece! I love the mix or colors and exotic shape of fuchsias! This was painted from a reference taken with my phone in my daughter’s garden

The beginning
 Born and raised in the Chicago suburbs, Pamela now lives in Geneva, IL, about 40 miles west of Chicago. Geneva is a small and pretty river town, and a source of inspiration for her art. Pamela attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, majoring in painting and drawing, then left to raise a family. In her early 30s she got into graphic design and later became art director of a magazine for a number of years. With her youngest child in college, Pamela enrolled in a series of oil pastel classes at a local arts center. She then left her job to pursue her dream of being an artist and began exhibiting her work and winning awards. After discovering that oil pastels could not be entered into pastel competitions, she purchased her first box of pastels, Rembrandts, and the light bulb went off. “I found my medium!” she says.

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In her own voice
​ “For me art is like breathing. For a long time I didn’t do art. When I discovered pastels I felt like my wings had been clipped and then suddenly they were back, and I was soaring. I will never again not create art. I have to create! I can always tell when it has been too long since I touched a pastel because I feel unsettled. I like to paint anything I can personally connect with—nature, flowers from my garden, sunlit garden paths, dramatic skies, birds & animals and my grandchildren. It has been a challenge to build a consistent body of work since I like to paint so many different things. I like traditional fruit and floral still life because I can study the way light hits the objects creating shadows, form and nuances of color. I won a Unison© contest last Christmas. In 2020 and 2021, I received my first national awards, both from Dakota Pastel competitions. I achieved Signature Member status in the Pastel Society of America and Signature with the Chicago Pastel Painters. These milestones are very validating because I’m dedicated, I put time and practice into it. This has brought me broader recognition. My Instagram following has more than doubled in the past year.” 


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I’m very passionate about painting landscapes but it has been more challenging than still life. I think it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the complexity of nature. I’ve been working hard to simplify the shapes and create compositions that pull the viewer into the scene. I joined Bethany Fields Patreon last year. She’s been an amazing mentor and source of inspiration; I admire her greatly. I’ve since seen significant growth in my work resulting in increased sales of my landscape paintings. I find painting a very detailed portrait can be stressful. So then I’ll go and paint a simple still life or landscape that doesn’t require as much accuracy.
About her technique
​ “I limit the amount of blending I do. I start with hard pastels, then I layer softer and softer. Then I go back with a hard pastel on its edge and skim and pull pigment without blending everything together. I’ve played with Multimedia Artboard Pastel Boards for landscapes, and I love them but they are very coarse and kick up a lot of pastel dust, so I use fixative on them. I don’t typically use a lot of fixative in my work but on this support, you have to. The effect is beautiful, you can really see darker colors underneath showing through the lighter ones on the surface. “Glittering Greens” - Pastel - 12x12 “I LOVE to paint a holiday themed piece every year. This was no exception—I thoroughly enjoyed every second of painting this one, especially the sparkly bits! I used a wet underpainting and Isopropyl alcohol on UART paper”. Unison Colour Christmas Competition Winner in 2020 I mix it up depending on my mood but having an emotional connection to the subject is essential. For references, I take my own pictures and then I play with cropping them until I find a pleasing composition. When I have an idea, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and paint! As for supports, I prefer sanded papers: LuxArchival, Uart, La Carte and Multimedia Artboard. Red La Carte is amazing for florals”.​ tones and shadows seem to play an important role in your paintings. How did this come about? 

“Glittering Greens” - Pastel - 12x12 “I LOVE to paint a holiday themed piece every year. This was no exception—I thoroughly enjoyed every second of painting this one, especially the sparkly bits! I used a wet underpainting and Isopropyl alcohol on UART paper”. Unison Colour Christmas Competition Winner in 2020

“One of two staff dogs at the Art Box where I teach, Oakley is a darling King Charles Cavalier Spaniel. I painted it from a reference photo taken with my phone during class, then gifted the piece to the shop’s owner for Christmas that year. I did a very simple underpainting with NuPastels and Isopropyl alcohol”.

Pamela teaches at an independent art supply store and gallery, a couple of miles from her house. She says, “I like teaching. I learn a lot about myself, and it encourages me to be more experimental”.
​She admires the impressionists, Monet, Mary Cassat and her painting of children, Renoir, and John Singer Sargent. She follows Bethany Fields, Alain Picard, Tony Allain, Barbara Jaenicke, Liz Haywood-Sullivan, Nancy Nowak, Corey Pitkin, Carol Peebles, Rita Kirkman, and Barbara Newton, among others, for inspirations and to keep learning.​"
-Adriana Rapolla - PSST VP of membership and Communications chair.

“Layla” - Pastel - 12x9 “Layla is my youngest grandchild. She is now 2-1/2 and just as beautiful as she was at 5 months. I painted this on a recycled piece of Pastel Premier paper (I washed off a failed landscape and reused the paper!). If you look at the clothing part of this piece, you can see the residual ghosting of the old underpainting where it stained the paper”. Accepted into the Richeson 75 Portrait and Figure Competition in 2019.

Visit Pamela's Website