RSW's Diary Comments

Page 3, SVAA 21st Annual Exhibit Program
August 26, thru September 4, 1950

• Woodward did not keep records of the pastels he called "chalk drawings."

Editor's Note:

Discovered as the result of our audit of the Southern Vermont Artists Association Inc. programs. The subject is unknown. The image to the right shows the name "From Old England," and Woodward corrects it on the pamphlet as he usually did when the name was wrong.

There is another painting name in the clipping, another pastel, named: The Blue of Equinox. Note the price for these pastels, $125. For whatever reason, the price of his pastels remained the same throughout his career. We suspect there are two reasons for this. The first is that the pastels pre-date his turn to become a professional landscape artist and it was his way of staying connected to his first love, drawing. The second reason is that Woodward took great pride in making his pastels look and feel similar to his oil canvases but be more affordable to regular folks, like teachers and librarians, small business owners and farmers.

Old New England, Chalk

⮜ The subject could be any number of themes Woodward focused on. It could be any of its neighbors in the FG Gallery: Forgotten New England, From Old Deerfield, or From Our Forefathers. It could be the same as the pastel to the left from 1930, Old New England, Chalk. Normally we would think that is unlikely because of the time gap, however, Old New England exhibited at the 1931 Springfield Art League in 1931 and because of that, there is a sepia print of it that survived his 1934 Hiram Woodward house and studio fire.