For quite some time I painted with oil colour until my Erasmus semester in Iceland. My new teacher there asked me to stop painting for a while and just draw. That was kind of difficult for me, since my work is so much about colour and surfaces. I figured out that the best way for me to draw was using soft pastels. The feeling by using this material was so different from painting with a brush. I felt closer to the movement, I could work in a faster tempo, and all in all it just felt much more natural. I started then to focus on combining drawing and painting through the use of soft pastels.
When I came back to Vienna, my professor motivated me to experiment more with it, so I decided to paint with pastels in bigger formats. Paper although was never my medium of choice. In addition keeping pastel works is difficult and framing big works is expensive. It was clear, that I needed to find a way how to preserve the beautiful vibrant colours of my pastel works. I also really wanted to bring them onto the canvas.
Throughout a year I experimented in many ways how to keep the pastel on the canvas. 
And after some time, actually through an accident, I figured out that applying the pastel on a wet, ungrounded canvas made the pigments sink inside the fabric and stay there after drying. 
The pastel was now almost fixed for eternity, but I still was not totally satisfied with how it looked.
I wanted to make the canvas shiny and be able to partly paint with oil colour on it too.
To make it brief - I found out that I needed some kind of “grounding” on the fabric to allow oil colour onto the surface.
Through the use of “heavy acrylic gel” I found the perfect way to make my paintings as vibrant, colourful and shiny as they could be. I apply this transparent gel after the pastel layer, kind of like a see through canvas grounding. That allows me to bind the pastel firmly in place without it losing any of its natural, beautiful look. The surface becomes glossy once the acrylic gel layer dries and it builds a solid, grounded surface which can be painted over by oil. 
I’m really happy that I didn’t give up looking for solutions to find ways how to combine those materials, because now I can truly say that I make my paintings how I can do them best and how it feels the most honest to me.

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