On Making · Slow Art 🌸

Why the Most Beautiful Things Cannot Be Rushed

On oil pastel, months of waiting, hunting for sun in the Pacific Northwest, and what it means to love a painting all the way to its finish. 🌸

A painting worth living with is worth taking the time to truly make.

You have heard of slow food, the movement born in protest fast food culture, insisting that a meal worth eating is worth growing, preparing, and savoring. There is slow travel, slow fashion, and slow living. And now, quietly, there is Slow Art: the radical idea that a painting worth living with is worth taking the time to truly make.

I think about this often, because I work in oil pastel, a medium that does not know how to hurry. And in a world where content is produced, posted, and consumed in seconds, where a digital artwork can be generated in moments and an algorithm can surface a thousand images before you've finished your morning coffee, I am here with my pastels and my patience, doing something that takes months before it is finished.

I wouldn't have it any other way.

What Slow Art actually means

The Slow Art movement borrows its philosophy from slow food: that the process matters as much as the product. That rushing through creation produces work you can feel has been rushed; thin, unconsidered, made to be consumed and forgotten. Slow Art insists on presence. On care. On the kind of attention that leaves a trace in the finished work, the way you can feel the hand of a crafts person in a well-made chair or taste the patience of a slow-fermented bread.

For collectors, Slow Art means something different than it does for artists. It means choosing to live with a piece that carries real time in it, not just hours, but seasons. It means resisting the impulse to fill walls quickly and instead finding the one work that stops you, the one that asks something of you in return. Original floral art, botanical paintings, works made by hand in demanding traditional media, these are not decorations. They are objects with history inside them.

The truth about oil pastel

When people imagine painting, they often picture something that dries quickly; watercolor in minutes, acrylics in an hour. Oil pastel is nothing like that. The medium is waxy, luminous, and extraordinarily slow to cure. A finished painting can take months to dry fully before it can be varnished. Not days. Months.

And varnishing itself is its own patience. I live in the Pacific Northwest, where the sun does not always cooperate. Varnishing must happen outdoors, in dry conditions, in good light. Some pieces wait weeks for the right day: a clear morning, low humidity, enough warmth to let the varnish set properly. You can see where this becomes… aspirational. Full months pass where everything is ready, except the weather. So, the paintings wait again. And I wait with them. We love the weatherman. The painting is ready. The sky may not.  

The full journey of a single painting

Oil pastel dries from the outside in, slowly, on its own timeline entirely.

What most people see is the finished piece; glowing on a wall, catching light, looking as though it arrived effortlessly. What they don't see is everything that came before. Every original oil pastel painting I make moves through a process that is genuinely complex, a kind of loving manufacturing, where each piece must be tracked, stored, tended, and waited on at every stage.

• Concept & Composition:  A flower, a feeling, a color memory. The idea lives in the mind before it touches paper, sometimes for days. Days to weeks
• Laying the foundation: First layers of oil pastel, building form and light. Each layer must be considered, there is no undo, no ctrl-z, no erasing back to blank.  Hours to days
• Building & refining: Color is layered, blended, and earned. The cleanup alone is meticulous; oil pastel is a medium that asks for care at every step, including after.   Days
• The long wait, curing: The finished painting is stored carefully, tracked, and left to cure. Oil pastel dries from the outside in, slowly, on its own timeline entirely. Months
• Waiting on the weather: Varnishing requires the right day: sun, low humidity, outdoor conditions. In the Pacific Northwest, that day must be watched for and seized. Weather-dependent
• Finished, finally: The piece is complete. Protected. Ready to live on someone's wall for decades, carrying all that time inside it.

The rest of its life

Each step compounds the one before it. A delay at any stage expands the total time exponentially. This is not inefficiency, it is the nature of the medium, and I have come to see it as a feature, not a flaw. The painting earns its finish. So does the person who waits for it.

When you hang an original oil pastel floral painting on your wall, you are not just hanging an image. You are hanging months. You are hanging a Pacific Northwest morning when the sky finally cleared.

When you hang an original oil pastel floral painting on your wall, you are not just hanging an image. You are hanging months. You are hanging a Pacific Northwest morning when the sky finally cleared. You are hanging the particular patience of a medium that will not be hurried, and an artist who has learned, sometimes reluctantly, to honor that.

That is what makes handmade original art different from everything else you could put on a wall. It is not faster, cheaper, or more convenient. But it is alive in a way that digital work simply cannot be. You can feel it, even if you cannot name what you're feeling. That warmth, that presence, that sense of something having been truly made. That is Slow Art. And it lasts.

🌺

With patience and oil pastel,
 — Cynthia