Texture, texture!

One of the things I like so much about encaustic is the ability to embed a variety of papers and objects.

This 8" X 8" contains balled up tissue paper that is covered with shellac and partially burned and it stands up from the surface about 2 inches. It has lots of warm carmel and brown colors. Also, I know books and instructors out there say that really only light tissue paper can be properly embedded but here I burned some sketchbook paper making large holes and I was able to embed this, so I always say, experiment with the rules!

By the way this is called "Blister" - don't let it creep you out. It's my husbands favorite of the Burn series so far.

We've been struggling a bit on the coast here because the weather has been tootling along for the last 2 months between 57-63 degrees with lots of overcast and patchy fog which is honestly rather cool to do my best work in encaustic without a heated table. So though it's been cool and comfortable in the studio, the wax is a bit sluggish. Then last week the temperature went up to 95 degrees for 2 days then back down to 63 yesterday and today. It's hard to be happy about getting hot weather like that because it's hard to adapt that quickly to a 30 plus degree change.

However we did have some fresh grilled oysters and they were terrific! Yummm.
Happy painting!

Moving forward

With my earlier work destroyed and my new direction set, I find a calmness, a sense of rightness, and a little spark of itchiness returning to me. Curiosity, different dreaming, walk with me day and night along with scary new steps and constantly reassuring friends that I'm on the right path.

All people young or old who take drastic steps like this or who have it foisted on them always walk around for at least a little while with a huge lump in their throat, a stone in their chest wondering what life there is after their big leap.

It's a changed life and life that now can accept new visions. These moments are as close to real freedom as we can get. We can do something different though we may have to linger a while in this scary place till we know what to do. Take heart in knowing soon a new vision will present itself because the clutter is gone along with new energy to carry it out.

In the meantime, I've moved my studio to my garage totally (this would have been really overwhelming without the new energy I mentioned above) and am starting some larger pieces than this 8" X 8" piece called Copper Pit which has been Sold.

At the recent international Encaustic Conference in Beverly Massachusetts, founded, organized and led by Joanne Mattera , I had the great opportunity to hear a 1 hour talk on working large from Kandy Lozano. Kandy is an artist making large encaustic pieces and a gallery owner of Martin & Lozano gallery located in California. She generously shared her own process and tool and substrate changes required when she started working large and added information such as what is required for storing, packaging, showing, representing size on a website and shipping those pieces. Such a rare person to be confident in her own work and forthcoming about the journey. Thank you Kandy.

So I'm going to be putting some of her tips to work and I'm going to be starting a body of work that I feel is cohesive and can be represented to a gallery as a unique expression. The directions will be offshoots of "Copper Pit" and the next several small pieces. I'm tremendously enjoying working in a neutral palette and it's changed the work I do. I like the simplicity and primitiveness of it.

I have to add here that living in rural Southwest Washington on the Coast has turned out to be a real blessing this year in that the weather has maintained a constant 57-63 degrees all summer so far. The marine air has rolled in during the night and stayed nearly all day every day for all of the last 2 months except for 1- 95 degree day. With the rest of the country blistering today, I can work my wax in rare comfort. All of the trees, shrubs, plants and flowers and grasses, even the dune grasses are green and well watered by the dew every morning.

Change -pain and hope

Change is often traumatic, even when you can feel it coming on as I have for almost a year now, and you have an idea what it's about and why "now". The repercussions of change are painful and exhilarating at the same time or alternating from despair to hope in the space of a day and then back again in what feels like an endless loop. But at some point it all comes to a head where you have to make a jump, and usually it feels like it's off a cliff.

Today, here, my picture is Ancient Forests - it's an 8" X 8" encaustic with shellac burn on birch luan -$125 and it's the one I brought with me to Montserrat Conference in Boston for the "Best Foot Forward" exhibit. It's fitting that this is my new beginning because it also signals the end to some of my past painting life directions.

This past week I destroyed all of my work on paper from my watercolor days and more recent acrylic work, and all the inventory I had built up for doing fairs and markets. I sold my tent and am getting rid of my tent table covers as well as most of those related art supplies. I kept some framed work and feel I will reuse canvases. I have been in deep mourning and depression about doing this but now after it's done I feel free and see joy may be around the corner.

I will be focusing on a new body of work for gallery presentation in encaustic in a relatively neutral palette with a primitive sensibility. I'm developing a theme and will use that to guide the direction of this new work. I've chosen this as my primary medium for right now - it's very physical work, there are many elements to experiment with, wax has a venerable history and I'm drawn to everything about it. I will be using venetian plaster as my ground (thank you Kandy) on wood cradles. To that end I've set up my studio in my garage where I have good ventilation, a big rough space, large tables with heating matts, overhead lights and new propane and butane tools.

As I move forward and especially as I begin to miss the intense color I am used to painting, I'm going to begin relearning to paint figurative patterned work in oil paint and again I will be developing a theme which will guide my process and development of new work. And yes I have a partially formed idea of what it will be. It's how I knew that change was coming. I kept having these ideas of work that was so different than my abstract color work from my past.

I've contracted with myself to work intensely in these directions and bring some new pieces into the world and I am feeling new energy about it. Hope you will like my new directions. Oh, and yes now I wear a respirator all the time when I paint.

Do any of you readers want to share your change stories?

Montserrat and Beyond

Well what a fantastic experience - going to the Montserrat Encaustic Conference in Beverly Massachusetts.

Here is a small shot of the exhibition of everyone who attended the conference. We were each allowed to bring one of our encaustic paintings and hang it on the board called "Best Foot Forward" . Since there were nearly 250 attending this turned out to be quite the gallery. It was on the second floor of the School building where all of the demo's and talks were being held and where all the vendor's were selling their wares. So we got to go by it frequently and see the new additions.

I met up with 2 painters from Omaha Nebraska named Tricia and Betsy and all together we took in the 4 day event which was packed full of lectures and panel discussions as well as great restaurants and the conference demo's and lectures. In addition there were 4 other gallery shows in the area sporting encaustic works - one of them called "Wax Libris" met us first thing on the morning of the first day as we picked up our registration packets in the Montserrat Library since it was a show of waxed book arts - absolutely charming and amazing. I'll be showing you pictures of this next.

And other than the show itself and the good company I kept, I was charmed and overwhelmed by the beautiful surrounding landscapes, the port and nearby Salem where we made an excursion to. More about that later. It was a cool 65-70 degrees too so just right for my northwest coast sensibilities.

And it helped me choose the direction I want to focus on more clearly as encaustic. So you'll be seeing more wax paintings as I go forward.

Countdown to Montserrat

Here is an acrylic painting I finished recently. It's 24" X 30" and I call it Mixed Message. I have it up at Azure with a price of $350.

In many ways I like this painting in that I felt freer when I did it. I used favorite processes and images like circles and the pattern of metallic gold on my small block stencil. I also wanted layers of colors from background forward and I wanted to include white since many of my paintings once layered with colors don't include this clean looking color. So I like it with the final cobalt blue strings of color to jazz it up and it has a bit of an ancient/modern combined feel to it. The eye catches on the circles.

Though I've been on an acrylic run here for awhile, I really do paint in encaustics and to that end, I'm attending the annual migration to Beverly, Massachusetts in early June to attend the Montserrat Conference. It's now only 2 weeks away and I'm busy making lots of plans to ride share and connect with friends from different parts of the country whom I've known in doing my encaustics. It will be intensive, tiring and jet-lagged, but fun and full of lots of new art work and techniques in molten beeswax. Such fun!

The only challenging part is that I now live and have adapted to basically the lovely marine climate we have on the Washington coast which is right now about 60 degrees and misting where as Boston at Logan Airport hit 80 yesterday and is projected to be 96 today with tons of humidity. How do you get through that much difference in temperature? Any thoughts readers? We are supposed to each bring an encaustic painting that would fit within a 12" X 12" space so we can a feel for what others are doing.

Gracies Dress

My husband's granddaughter just had her first birthday and so I made her this little sundress for her to wear over a little t-shirt or bare if it gets too hot. Already she is a national traveler since she will journey with her parents to Oklahoma every summer.

I hadn't realized it had been so long since my last post. I finished up a number of paintings, varnished them and rigged the hangers and have now hung a 14 piece show of new work in variable sizes at Azure Day Spa in Ilwaco, Washington. All of it is mixed media and all of them are paintings except for a 12" X 12" cloth quilt and bead piece.

I'm getting ready for the big peninsula wide garage sale that is annually held May 28th through 30th and is attended far and wide drawing people from Vancouver, Portland, Longview and many places east. This is our first since we moved down here and we hope to clear the whole left side garage bay of it's treasures and trash. It has been a really overwhelming process.

And for those of you who follow this blog, I'm heading out on June 10th to Beverly Massachusettes for the Monserrat Encaustic Conference. This is the 4th annual I believe and it is an international conference of encaustic painters. Many of my aquaintances will be there for the 4 day conference which includes a full slate of demonstrations and talks and gallery showings of encaustic work. There are 3 days of post conference classes which I will not be attending. But this is my first conference for encaustic and I'm looking forward to it mightily. I'll take lots of pictures with my crummy digital and post some for you so you can see a bit of the conference.

I'm sad I won't be able to attend my friend Sue Robertson's Joyful Art Exhibit opening at Art's and Cultural Exchange in Astoria for Art Walk that will be showing during the time I'm gone but I will get in to see it after I return. I'm encouraging my art loving friends from the peninsula to go see her show as she has great, great work! It kicks off the summer tourist season too!

Coming Down and Putting Up

Morning All! I'm getting ready to put up a new group of paintings at Azure Day Spa in Ilwaco next week. Meaning I'm in the finishing stages of preparing the work - wiring up the canvases, putting on isolation coats, varnishing, taking pictures (with a terrible digital camera).

This picture will go up and is much brighter and more cheerful in real life. I call it "Migrations", it's 30" X 24" mixed media and I think I put a price of $425. I used technical inks, reduced fluid acrylics, absorbent ground and lovely patterning all over.

I have some other paintings I'll be showing over the next few posts that will be hung in that show and I'll be painting more too!

We've been doing intensive landscaping at our new home since the site was completely filled with beach sand and in order to prevent tracking indoors on our new floors AND to prevent serious erosion we planted local lawn and sod and it's been a big project. We're done now with that and are just finishing our shrub borders.

I'm going to be attending the Montserrat Encaustic Conference in Boston on June 10th through June 14th which I have been wanting to do for many years and it just so happened we had the airline points to do it this year so back in January I signed up for this - a great confluence of encaustic artists in this country - capped to 250.

Then on June 21st through June 25th I'm taking an Acrylic Workshop with Robert Burridge up in LaConner, WA - my friend Sue Robertson has taken many classes from him and highly recommends him. And since I feel the need for some change in my work - more texture maybe, more meaning definitely, more versatility in and direction in creating series of works, this seems to be the year - and the month for investing a bit in myself and my painting.

And let's not forget how important it is for an artist to get out and see new things, get excited about new patterns and combinations, bump into different opinions and ways of looking at the world. Several of my friends are in the process of planning wonderful trips and I just wish I could ride in their pocket as they travel to all parts of the world.

So all you readers - get out there this summer and sample the life all around you especially if you're going to new places and send us some pictures of your travels, even and especially if it's just interesting patterns or colors on pavement or on old walls!