Happy Together
Encaustic and rice paper on cradled birch panel
10″x 10″ x 1.75″ deep
©2009

Painting in Encaustic: Liberation and Challenge

For about the past year-and-a-half, I have been in a bit of despair over how to continue working in encaustic.

I started using encaustic paints in 2006. Encaustic paint is pigment suspended in a mixture of beeswax and damar resin that the artist heats and paints with while in a melted state (the paint, not the artist ) – you can read more about encaustic here.

My first attempts were simply thick coatings of clear wax covering small pastel drawings of tornadoes.  Then I began painting the tornadoes using the hot wax.  As paradoxical as it may sound, I found the demands of the encaustic medium really liberated me from my former work that was too tight or too representational for my own satisfaction.  One cannot be tight when painting in encaustic AND achieve a smooth surface, and I fell in love with the smooth surface and the unpredictability of what happens to colors melted in wax when you blow them around with hot air. For the next year or so, I was thrilled to continue working in hot wax.

I began a series of nuclear bomb paintings in encaustic, intending to paint about 100 of them, but my idea was too daunting for a subject matter that was so frightening. Having grown up in the days of duck-and-cover, I decided I couldn’t really live with that fright through the creation of 100 paintings, so I quit after completing only five nuclear bomb paintings.

I then did a political piece consisting of nine iconic images that I digitally manipulated, printed and then encased in hot wax: my “What Have We Become?” piece.  However, for most of my painting history, I have been primarily concerned with the formal qualities of art — just the beauty of the stuff on the canvas — and I always meant to avoid political statements, so this piece has (so far) stood as kind of a one-off.

Then I tried animating some encaustic paintings, but my physical set-up made that a very difficult process, so I have also put that aside for the time being.

After trying all of the above, I had a flash of inspiration and painted my set of poppy paintings (the four paintings starting with this one).  Simultaneously, I moved on to painting abstract works in encaustic.  You can see all of those pieces on my Encaustic gallery page.

In the beginning of 2008, I moved back to painting in oil again — which feels so much like home to me — and I also tried acrylic, which has now found a place in my work (when I want to work both large and fast).  But after that, I kind of hit a dead end with encaustic.  The rest of my work was becoming organic, but my next attempts at encaustic took on a design-y kind of rigid structure.  I did about 6-8 paintings like that this past summer at a workshop, and have been really unsatisfied with most of that work.  In fact, I have removed all but two of them from my Encaustic gallery page, though you can view them in the tiny thumbnail gallery below.

I’ve also tried working in ways that I see many other encaustic artists work — collaging paper and fabrics into the hot wax, scraping and carving, and embedding objects in the wax — but so far, for me, these have mostly been dismal failures.

Meanwhile, back at the easel, my latest work was taking on quite an organic shape (see the organic series on the Sketches page – now in it’s very own gallery: Organics), so I thought I’d try this imagery in encaustic as well as oil and acrylic; after three partial days of messing around with this piece, I am pretty happy with the outcome.  I’m preparing several more panels to continue my explorations in this direction.

This one, Happy Together, is just the first of my encaustic pieces for my new Organics series, and I do anticipate that I will be quite happy with subsequent pieces.  What do you think?

“What Have We Become?”
9 Digital Prints with Encaustic on Masonite and Chain Links
~34″ x 37″

Here are pictures of most of my pieces from the Netroots Nation/Texas Kaos show.

“Plumbob Priscilla”
Encaustic on Masonite
8″ x 10″
Framed
O.D. 9.75″ x 12″

“Operation Bravo”
Encaustic on Plexiglas
12″ x 12″
Framed
O.D. 13.25″ x 13.25″

“Castle Romeo”
Encaustic on Plexiglas
12″ x 9″
Framed
O.D. 13.25″ x 10″

“Romeo”
Encaustic on Plexiglas
9″ x 12″
Framed
O.D. 10″ x 13.25″

What a great show!  My large piece “What Have We Become?” was prominently featured on the main wall and was big hit with the Netroots Nation folks.  One guy even gave me a huge hug when he found I was the artist of that piece.

I had my 5 paintings of nuclear bombs in this show, along with the piece mentioned above and a image transfer/encaustic piece of “Chernobyl.”

There were 6 other artists in this show with great and varied work.   I thought I took more pictures than I actually did (that usually seems to be be the case!).  As it turned out, we were enjoying the opening so much, the party lasted well past closing time.

Blogging from the Right Side of the Brain Art Exhibit

Texas Kaos Presents Netroots Nation After Party and Art Exhibit
Hosted by Bay6 Gallery and Studios

Reception:
Saturday July 19th
7:00PM to 10:00PM
5305 Bolm Rd Bay6 Austin TX.

As the Netroots Nation conference winds to a close Saturday evening, we invite you to join us and Bloggers from across the nation at Bay6 Studios to ‘Kick Back and Kick it Up before We Kick ‘Em Out!’

Sponsored and hosted by Texas Kaos and Bay6 Gallery and located five minutes from the Austin Convention Center in East Austin, the event will feature music, food, drink and present a group art exhibition “Blogging from the Right Side of the Brain” featuring work by Texas artists Marilyn Fenn, Daphne Holland, Jack Howe, Darvin Jones, Mindy Kober, Sharon Kyle-Kuhn and Brooke Wilton.

For more information and direction see www.texaskaos.com, www.bay6studios.com

“Operation Bravo”
Encaustic on Plexiglas
12″ x 12″
©2007

I had wanted to complete more of my planned large series of atomic bomb paintings done in time to apply to a local show dealing with war.  I’ve got only 5 done now, and these last two need a little tweaking, but for now, here they are:

“Castle Romeo”
Encaustic on Plexiglas
9″ x 12″

I suppose that sounds more like a political statement than one on art, but as I’m working on a large series of paintings of nuclear bombs, it really is a statement about my art.

I envision painting about 100 paintings of nuclear bombs, which would be just a drop in the bucket compared to how many nuclear bombs exist on our planet today.

OK, so it’s a little political, too, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

There is both a power and a beauty in the fractal qualities of the cloud-like forms of nuclear bombs — and hurricanes and tornadoes — that fascinates me.  They make a great subject for painting my small encaustic paintings that aim to straddle the space between abstraction and representation.  My goal is to paint really beautiful paintings, even if they are of troubling subjects — maybe especially if they are of troubling subjects — in the hope that the viewer can see past the scariness of the bombs, tornadoes and hurricanes, and see the beauty of the paint.

For me, these paintings are paint first, and images second.   Take a look at my small beginning paintings, and stay tuned for more to come.