I found an old art diary the other day and took some time to read through it. It was kind of fascinating to read what my thoughts were almost 20 years ago, when I had just started experimenting with encaustic paint. I had been wanting to work large and with color after 20 years making small, black and white prints. Recently I had played around with pastel and oil paint but nothing hit my sweet spot. Here is some of what I wrote after learning to work with encaustic paint and trying out some different approaches:
I spent the day yesterday painting someone else’s paintings. Not sure what it means (if anything) but it has rattled me some. Maybe it was just a diversion, some playing with color and mark. But there is something there—I sense it.
Here is a painting from those early early days.
“Real is a ThIng,” 20 x 20
And of course there was something there. I have been painting with encaustic since, and making new discoveries with it almost daily. It is such a flexible medium, so able to handle any sort of expression, from loose and abstract to precise and representational. You can imbed papers into it, scribe lines into it, scape away parts of it (or all of it!), transfer images onto it, and on and on. I never fails to provide ample opportunity for experimentation and play.
But this new way of working was strange and somewhat overwhelming for this black and white printmaker. I was craving to work larger and in color and painting in encaustic gave me a way in.
But still I didn’t understand what it meant to me. I wrote next:
I went for a walk down by the river and looked at the visual chaos of the woods and began to understand these paintings as abstractions of the deceptive appearance of disorder in nature. But the complexity of a forest view has its own order created by shape, color, texture, line. My paintings seem to be a formal expression of those things I see on my walks. Houses, trees, bushes, gardens, paths, sky— a cacophony of shape and color. As I layer color on color, impose shape over shape, some opaque, some transparent, I feel I am attempting to impose some order to the visual complexity of any given viewpoint. …I am finding this approach so exciting, energetic and dangerous even, like jumping off a cliff and then figuring out how to fly. I think I am ready to take the leap and learn to fly along the way.
So I painted for a while longer and then had my first show of encaustic paintings. I titled that show “A Wide River” which is how I felt about where I had been to where I was now, a far distance aesthetically and emotionally. Here is the signature painting from that show.
“A Wide River,” 24 x 48