A note about the Rites of Passage series
The following pages contain a series of pastels on garnet paper a somewhat orange, type of sandpaper. I wanted to express myself in a way that I felt more “authentically me”. Basically I was starting over and trying to forget everything I had learned about drawing and painting. As a child I made things that were more realistic and representational rather than the loose abstract things one might associate with children. I wanted to be more inventive and free. The pastels were executed mostly late at night in my studio in Brooklyn. NY over a short period of time. While they started as more abstract exercises I began to have what I felt were “epiphanies” or “revelations” during the process of making the pastels. Working intensely on them was a meditative experience. My thoughts gravitated towards events in my childhood and how they related to my then current life. In hindsight I was in the process of re-inventing myself. Some of the pastels related to emotionally charged moments in my childhood and early youth and some related to my then current state of mind relating to going forward on a new path in my work and in life. As the work progressed a narrative began to form and I titled the pieces to conform to that narrative. It was a very emotionally intense period in my life. These pieces became my first one person show at the Hallwalls Gallery in Buffalo, NY in 1982 where many of the young avante garde artists in the Eighties came from and exhibited. A comment from one of the artists attending the opening particularly made me feel good and that I had made the right decision to start this new way of expressing myself. He thanked me for having the courage to exhibit such personal work and that he felt it gave him permission and courage to express his innermost feelings in his own work.
--Christopher Engel