"Wind in the Pines" is a pastel painting, 28x22".  It was painted over an old pastel I had started and lost interest in.  With pastels, you can only apply a certain amount of material to the surface before it won't stick anymore or you begin to pull up the bottom layer.  That limited my options for content, since I needed to accomplish the piece with very few strokes.  I took this picture of a silhouetted pine tree in Pisgah National Forest back in the early 2000's.  I have always loved the shapes and lines of the branches.  The tree, however, was entirely backlit and thus a very flat dark shape.  That was uninteresting to me so I improvised light hitting the trunk and branches.The result is textured with lots of movement and visible strokes of the pastel, again letting the medium have a prominent role.  Happy Thursday!