“Traces”
Encaustic and Mixed Media on Paper Mounted on Birch Panel
12″ x 12″
© 2009 Marilyn Fenn

I think I started this painting almost two years ago! I was never quite satisfied with it, though. There was something about the left-hand side of the painting that I just could never resolve. In the process of my attempts to resolve the left-hand side, some of the crispness on the right-hand side got literally blown away, since it is encaustic, and I am using a hot air gun to fuse the layers of wax.  The air tends to blow the paint around and blend it together, which I used to my advantage in the nuclear bomb, tornado and poppy paintings, but I had carved the stems into this painting, and carefully filled them in with oil paint.  Subsequent workings blew those lines around, the little ball-shapes got smushed or distorted, and I eventually put the piece aside until a couple of days ago.

Update: I decided the dark piece of raffia was too much of a divider, and also reworked some of the shapes and lines I had lost in the process of working on this piece.  Some little bits of raffia remained embedded in the wax, and I kind of like that.  So I think I’m done…time will tell.

Here’s the only picture I have of what it looked like up until a couple of days ago:

On the left is what it looked like the morning of March 31st after a couple more working sessions, while on the right is how it looked on the afternoon of March 31st:

It is encaustic and mixed media on watercolor paper mounted on birch plywood, 12″x12″.

If you have a suggestion for a title, I’d love to hear that.  I can’t recall the name of the dried plant that inspired this piece…