The Screens show has been extended until November 15th.  It will come down at noon of the 16th.  This is your chance to get out to Medallion Gallery and see it.

A date has been set!  My next show will be at Medallion Gallery in Boston, MA.  This is my second time showing work from my screens series, with some of my older work from the series and some brand-spankin’-new work too.  The opening reception will be Thursday, October 2nd from 7pm-9pm.  Can’t make it then?  No worries, the show will be up from October 2nd-October 26th.  Take a trip to town, get some good food, good culture, and good artwork. Hope to see you there!

Stories in a Black Box at Brandt Gallery opened to a large crowd and much excitement.  Thanks to all my friends and supporters who came out to see the show.

A group of eight artists, including myself, collaborated on this exhibit, which ran from May 15-May 30, 2008.  This show marked the first official showing of my new encaustic series, Screens.  The reception of this new work was encouraging and inspiring.

I look forward to showing more of this series at my next exhibit, which will be a solo show at the Medallion Gallery in Boston starting in October.  Keep your eyes and ears open for more information in the coming weeks.

My encaustic method is an involved process of building up and tearing down layers of wax, slowly manipulating the medium and adding in texture and (often) other media. With a rough composition in my mind, my first step is to lay the initial layers of wax on my substrate.  This rarely results in the final image.  Often, the colors and quality of the wax dictate a new direction.  In my image The Storm Coming In 003, my first pass resulted in the piece at left.  After letting this sink in for a few days, I knew I had some working parts, and some parts I wanted to change. The course this image took from this first iteration to final composition is detailed below.

Preserving the pieces headed in a good direction while removing the areas in need of improvement can sometimes prove to be tricky. In this case, it was fairly straightforward - I just had to be careful where I was pointing that heat gun as I worked. The yellow was not working as I intended it to and I decided to eliminate it entirely. (In the image at left, note how the yellow area was stripped back to the substrate.) I had achieved a very nice texture in the red section above that, which I wanted to keep intact. (Notice how the midsection of the image remains unchanged throughout.) I also chose to expose more of the blue on the top that had been mostly covered in the first image.  When the first teardown cycle is complete, the image looks a little sad.  However, the direction usually solidifies in my mind as I remove areas that are not working and sculpturally add texture and meaning to sections I like. Typically, I plan out the final composition at this point, which helps me determine the order to lay down future layers of color.

Next, I embarked upon the second “addition” phase, where I layered wax back onto the image.  I also added a photograph to this composition at this point.  The photograph (of roiling water) ended up partially covered by wax, but served as inspiration for the bottom section where the wax mimics the spray of breaking water. The top “sky” area needed to appear stormier, so I added more black and tore down, melted, and smoothed the section to create a mottled effect. Each composition requires a different number of addition and subtraction cycles before the image gets to its final state.  In this case, The Storm Coming In 003 took approximately 3 “add” and 2 “tear down” phases to result in the final image, pictured at left.  This is relatively few cycles, as most of my images require more.  The final step for this image was to introduce some shells, which were tossed and broken by the breaking waves (figuratively. Literally, they were broken by the hand of the artist.) With a final buff and polish of the smooth sections, this image is done.

Notice how each iteration gets closer to the end composition and how vastly different the first and final images are.  This is something I love about the medium.  You can change and manipulate, add and subtract until you get exactly where you want the image to be.   Frequently, you even discover some “happy accidents” along the way!

Today was make-a-batch-of-encaustic-medium day. It is the most toxic part of the process, with resin dust wafting through the air (or sucked out the window with proper ventilation) and wax heated to a temperature a little too close to its flash point. For me, this is the “chore” section of working with encaustic, though I derive a strange satisfaction from seeing the finished bricks lined up and waiting to create something new.

I begin with resin crystals. They come in all sizes and of various clarity. All are sure to have bark and debris in them, but so far I have not discovered any bugs. Surely some small critters get trapped in there occasionally.

To aid in the speed of melting, the resin crystals are crushed in a mortar and pestle to a powder. The powder is then melted with a portion of the wax. This is done because the melting point of the resin is much higher than the melting point of wax.

Once the small portion of wax and resin are thoroughly mixed, the remainder of the wax is melted in at a safer, lower temperature. Nobody likes wax vapor becoming an ignitable mixture in the air. After the wax has melted into the resin mixture, the fluid is poured through cheesecloth to filter out the imperfections trapped in the resin, then into molds to cool.It takes a good couple of hours for the wax to cool completely. When it does, it is popped out of its molds and stored away until the day it is remelted, mixed with pigment, and transformed from wax lump to composition.

Tonight we visited the Den of Smoke - stinging eyes and putrid hair. Conversation included death and racism. Are we really such a different generation than our grandparents? Being there reminds me of my screen series, though. Each of us looks through a haze of our own creation, our own bigotries, our own enthusiasm and despair - in this case even a literal haze of cigarette smoke that declining health and science cannot quelch. This is a darker side to the series than I have yet explored, but perhaps I should explore this generational gap. Will we become like our grandparents and obsess over our age and the changing world? Will our smoke become thicker the longer we live and eventually obliterate the scenery around us, closing off our intent to remain open-minded and optimistic?