“My Eyes are Wings”

Here in the Southern USA spring started early. My car and literally everything else is constantly covered in pine pollen. However, it is beautiful here with trees and flowers blooming in full. I notice that green appears on my palette as well.

My studio is now blooming with new paintings. Since the beginning of the year I have been reassessing my practice, making changes, and investigating new imagery. The imagery is not entirely new of course but working back and forth between oil and cold wax and encaustic is an interesting challenge and has produced surprises that I am working to assimilate. My challenge has been to create the new work in oil and cold wax that have a close relationship to my encaustic paintings. I even took time to work out ideas in acrylic; a medium I haven’t used in many years. When I want to expand a series, I am up for experimentation.

The “Underneath it All” series has become one that is concentrating on trees and the landscape. The painting above is a very large entry to my series, 72 x 84 inches. It is cold wax and oil on canvas/panel/cradled. I have been working on this painting since November of last year (2016) and only finished it a week ago. The layers are many and the blues, my favorite king’s blue and blue ochre, were the starting point for the painting. The mark making came at the very end of the process and surprised me with it’s playfulness. The symbolic nature of the marks was inspired by alphabets that I created years ago with the “alphabet synthesis machine” a program unfortunately now unavailable.

Below are photos of a few of the current paintings. Work and others are included in the current exhibit at the Artisan Resource Center where I have my studio. Six of the artists at the complex joined with me in an open house exhibit of our new work which opened on April 15. Visiting the ARC Gallery is possible by appointment. Contact me if you would like to view the work.