Jean Hirons
Pastel Paintings

	Solstice Light
	The Perfect Day
	Morning Marsh Light
	A New Day

Jean Hirons 6 Radburn Ct. Rockville, MD 20850 Phone: 301-340-3198 E-mail: jeanhirons@comcast.net Web site: http://www.jeanhirons.com/

River Dance

Jean Hirons paints the landscape because it is what speaks to her. She is always looking for interesting patterns, textures, and colors, regardless of where she is. And thus, she paints many landscapes—those around her and those she experiences on trips in the U.S. and abroad. While some places have deep meaning, such as her home town of Mattapoisett, Mass., others offer more dramatic vistas that she can’t resist putting into pastel.


Her work is representational but she often digresses from the photo or scene. She works both en plein air and in the studio and find that it is with the latter that she can be most innovative. Hirons likes to work from the same scene using different sizes, surfaces, and color schemes to create pictures with very different moods.


Hirons works solely in pastel and is completely devoted to the medium. It is perhaps the most immediate and intimate of painting media as colors do not need to be mixed and are applied with the hands, rather than with a brush. She uses many kinds of pastels, favoring Great American, Schminke, and Unison. She works both on archival papers--Kitty Wallis and Art Spectrum Colourfix sanded papers, and on textured boards with surfaces that she has prepared.


Hirons joined Creative Partners Gallery at the conclusion of a 30 year career as a librarian, the last 20 years at the Library of Congress. She has a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from Marietta College and returned to art studies beginning in 1984 at the Corcoran Gallery and later at the Art League School in Alexandria, Va. Since 2001, she has been attending workshops led by nationally-known pastelists, including Albert Handell, Doug Dawson, Elizabeth Mowry, and Susan Ogilvie. She has also become an adjunct professor for pastel at Montgomery College in Rockville. Teaching others to appreciate pastel is one of the greatest joys of her new career.