Encaustic painting is painting with heated beeswax to which colored pigments are added. In an era when collage is being explored deeply, encaustic is a natural medium, since it allows both painterly explorations of color and the possibility of embedding objects and layering. The technique has been around since (at least) ancient Egypt, when it was used to create mummy portraits.

In 1955, Jasper Johns used this technique to create one of the first of his flag paintings. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the process:

“The painting consists of three separately stretched panels of cotton fabric joined at the back: the forty-eight stars area; the seven upper stripes to the right of the stars area; and the long area of the six stripes below. The painting is predominantly in the wax-based medium of encaustic. Johns worked on each panel separately, first laying down the overall flag design in charcoal. After applying a thin ground of unbleached, translucent beeswax, he built up the stars, the negative areas around them, and the stripes with applications of collage: small cut-out pieces of newsprint, other paper, and bits of fabric. He dipped these into molten beeswax and adhered them to the surface while the wax was hot. He then joined the three panels and painted over the entire surface with short, deliberate strokes of more unpigmented beeswax and touches of white oil paint.”

I have been poking around the internet, gathering more information on this technique. The most fascinating bit that I have found so far is a 12 page booklet titled, “Examples of Stencils and Masks” by Linda Womack from the 2008 National Encaustic Conference. Linda is the author of a book on the topic, Embracing Encaustic (which I have not seen yet) and the teacher of a recent workshop at the John C.Campbell Folk School. She has posted lots of exciting photos of the workshop on her blog.

The Second National Conference of Encaustic Painting at Montserrat took place June 6-8, 2008. Several bloggers have posted their comments on the conference, including an online presentation of the talk, “Encaustic with a Textile Sensibility” (Thanks to Joanne Mattera for this list!):

• Linda Womack’s Embracing Encaustic: Conference, Day 1; Conference Days 2 and 3; Linda’s Critique with Kay WalkingStick)
• Judy Wise’s blog: Encaustic Conference, Part 1; And Judy’s close encounter with Norman Laliberte
• Deanna Wood’s Artist Emerging blog
• Nash Hyon’s Encaustic Process blog
• Supria’s Encaustic Musings blog
• Daniella Woolf’s Encaustifiberopolis blog, which features an excerpted look at her talk “Encaustic with a Textile Sensibility” She begins, “I opened the door to encaustic from my perspective as a textile sculptor. The encaustic “medium” energized my work, and forever changed me.”

I’m not sure that I am ready to take the plunge into encaustic, but the layerings give me some inspiration for ways to take my acrylic paintings and textiles!

images:
top: Metropolitan Museum of Art via Flickr artist ggnyc
middle: Elise Wagner
bottom: Linda Womack

To stay fresh in textile arts, I like to spend time reading about and doing pastel drawings and paintings. This week I have been going through the painting blog of Nancy Reyner who has a wonderful idea for shaking your creativity loose.

“Turn Up the Volume on the Inner Voice
I discovered an easy and surprisingly beneficial painting warm-up exercise. This 20 minute exercise, performed daily for one month (or even less) will do wonders for increasing your creativity, getting rid of artistic blocks, and finding new styles or shifting your work. I came up with this after reading ‘Writing Down the Bones’ by Natalie Goldberg, a popular book for writers to increase their writing and creative abilities. Natalie suggested that writers should ‘clear their head’ by filling notebooks, and write in a stream of consciousness fashion, by writing without thinking, very directly, and not editing. I decided to transform this freestyle writing exercise to something that would work for painters. This is how it works: First get a pile of inexpensive painting surfaces that don’t feel precious to you. I gessoed some scraps of canvas that I had lying around. Gessoed sheets of paper, or cardboard work well too. Just don’t get too small in size. My scraps were actually around 16′ x 20′. The night before you start set everything up for painting so that you can just jump right in without any preparations. Pick a time, preferably first thing in the morning, and stick to a schedule for a length of time. Pick what works for you,perhaps trying one week to see how it goes, but you need at least 5 days in a row to make a good assessment. Make a commitment to acting out your very first thought. Now here is the key. Your first thought is the inner voice. Your second thought is the ‘parent’. We are so accustomed to paying attention to the second voice that the first is sometimes faint and barely there. This exercise will strengthen that first voice, sometimes called the ‘inner child’. I like using the phrase ‘first voice’ better or I feel like I am in therapy.”

Go to her blog and read the full entry. You may recognize yourself in her tale of shaking free. Reyner also has a new book, Acrylic Revolution, which I’ve ordered and am eagerly awaiting the postman’s delivery!

Right now, I am supposed to be writing tomorrow’s lecture (topic ‘information structures’..), but I stumbled way off-topic, when I came a slide of painter/ photographer Sean Scully. His works have striking resemblance to some of the best contemporary quilt making, dealing with similar issues of geometric visual constructions and harmony.
Brown University held a retrospective of Scully’s work and wrote:

“Scully’s work derived from the traditions of European early modernism (Mondrian and Matisse), in its ideals for harmony and spirituality, and American late modernism (Pollock and Rothko), in its urge for large, open-ended compositions, expressing personal inner states. How to reconcile European order with American vigor—or more specifically, how to combine Mondrian’s plastic clarity with Matisse’s sensuousness, Pollock’s drips, and Rothko’s fluidity—has remained the basic question of Scully’s art practice to which he gave slightly different answers throughout the years.”

Scully moves back and forth from photography to painting and back again:

“In Harris and Louis Shacks, a portfolio of twelve photographs, this process of transformation followed a different path, going from recognizable objects to subjective impressions of them. Although taken as snapshots of facades, windows, and doors in Scotland, these photographs are not straightforward recordings of architectural elements. By depicting fading walls, cracked surfaces, rough edges, and the deep shadows created by them, these images capture beauty in decay, and evoke the basic contradiction of nature and life: solidity and fragility, timelessness and change. In this way, as metaphors of physical and mental conditions, the photographs correspond to the abstract configuration of his paintings. While the former are tracing visible reality, the latter are capturing the memories, feelings, and thoughts connected to the experience of that reality. Nevertheless, looking at the photographs and paintings side by side only re-confirms the intricate relationship of material and immaterial, and physical and mental, aspects of life. It is precisely this continuing interchange of the recognizable and abstract worlds, the visible and the invisible, that empowers Scully’s works in all media, pointing to the horizon of their merging.”

This past winter, the Metropolitan Museum offered an exhibition, Sean Scully: Wall of Light, which explored variations on a theme.

“Inspired by the artist’s first visits to Mexico in the early 1980s, where he observed the play of light and shadow on ancient stone walls, this ongoing and distinctive body of work focuses on an exploration of abstract forms affected by light, evoking a range of emotional and narrative themes. Paintings from 1998 to the present are constructed with rectangular bricklike forms, closely fitted and arranged in horizontal and vertical groupings as if in a wall, and characterized by broad, gestural brushstrokes, a wide range of luminous colors built up in layers, and varying degrees of overall light and darkness.”

On my computer, I can admire Scully’s abstraction and composition. I can flick back and forth between Scully’s work the quilts of the Gees Bend. I can listen to Scully talk about his creation process (RealPlayer: 9:04 minutes) and points of inspiration. Still, I wish that I could see the works in person. Reportedly, the layering of paint and luminance of these layers create an effect that can’t be appreciated on the web.

The artists name is John Walker. Arts Editor’s review arrived in my email this morning. They promised something changed. I like the word changed. Too often the art world goes for ’shocking’, ‘unique’, ‘penetrating’, or ‘revealing’. Too often these words are synonyms for ‘offensive’, ‘cheap shots’ or just plain ‘gross’. The word ‘changed’ has softer possibilities. Possibilities that rely on gentle reflection more than in-your-face visual stunts. The review revealed that the artist has done just that. He has given us metaphors for age and change, at a very small personal, reflective scale.

This is something like the philosophies of site-specific earth artists. The cardboard will decay under the oil, given its organic nature, and the pieces will have a relatively short “untouched” life span before the cardboard begins to soak the paint and becomes something else. The colors will bleed and lose the vibrancy they’d have kept against gesso. As does earthen art, the Seal Point Series paintings will physically age with time.

Besides the material actually physically aging, the Bingo cards are, in a sense, culturally aging. There’s that dependency on time as a working part of the piece. There’s some vague moment of American Retro I could recognize in the cards, something out of a yard sale or a greasy spoon diner. Just as Robert Smithson refers to rust as the “fundamental property” of steel, the Bingo cards evoke a “fundamental property” of kitsch culture. It’s an effect that draws on the spectator’s experience and evolves in step with his national environment. There’s change present in the work—its own device of social corrosion. Smithson says of time as its own art medium: “The fact remains that the mind and things of certain artists are not ‘unities,’ but things in a state of arrested disruption.” ArtsEditor

This review is thought-provoking for exploring our own past via the textile arts. It is easy to print a photograph onto fabric, add it to a quilt, embroider it and call it art. When the transfer technology was brought to the forefront in the 1960s and 70s, it was fascinating, with great potential. But where is the change? Where is the evolution? The closing paragraph of the review offers some starting points for jostling the evolution of expression: ignore the obvious, the familiar symbols and uncover your own personal symbology.

There’s an interest in just watching things change. Take out the boxes that have been sitting in your attic and sift past everything you think might be valuable. Put aside your grandmother’s wedding silverware, because underneath it is an even dustier box, filled with your own green army men, your baseball mitt, and the stone you once thought was an Indian arrowhead. And then when noting the unusual dissonance in John Walker’s Seal Point Series, consider the small things from your own past. It’s hard to ignore the gradual bleeding of time into the genre of painting. ArtsEditor

Photos of the Seal Point series
A different review of the series with comments by the artist

Liz Whitney Quisgard has created artworks that her gallery describes simultaneously as “Rugs, Tapestries, Quilts” with a size given as”Dimensions vary, 6- 15 feet”. One photo has a room filled with lyrical, mesmerizing wall hangings of Moorish pattern. Her paintings continue this theme on a much larger scale, but without the sensuality of the textile pieces.

“Her fiber wall hangings are made from yarn on buckrum and have lush textured surfaces. These exquisite patterned pieces long to be touched. They are decorative, detailed and have a wonderful color sense transforming the space into a Moroccan palace…There are triangles, squares and geometric patterns in all these works – small dots of vibrant color that form intriguing patterns. The mixed media wall tiles are all this & just fun besides.” Franklin 54 Gallery

In my youthful, truth-seeking days, I wrote reams of justification for my work. Now that the work has matured and I, simultaneously, put less and less value on truth, words have become irrelevant. So, when called upon to explain what I do, I am inclined to say, “what you see is what you get.”

Couched in that flippant response is a firm conviction that the visual arts are exactly that, visual. No meanings. No messages. No preachments. No symbols. Politics, philosophy, the human condition, the environment and other causes about which people paint, perform and sculpt these days are subjects for discourse- best expressed with words. Attempts to transform them into pictorial images tend to become mere illustration – most often jejune.

My goal is to surprise and engage the mind seducing the eye. Toward that end I rely on pattern. The term “decorative” has been applied to my work, most often in a negative sense. But, that’s okay with me, for some of the most important art is essentially decorative. Islamic rugs, Greek column capitols, Navajo textiles, Byzantine mosaics, Baroque architectural embellishments… and so forth.

We all understand a row of triangles, a strip of squares, an arrangement of circles and swirls. No need to ask their meaning. They simply are what they are. They speak to us universally and without apology. Artists’s statement for solo show at Rutgers University (since removed from web)

Eleri Mills
Eleri Mills is a Welsh artist who combines painting, drawing and hand embrodiery in creating mythical landscapes on canvas. Mills has attained some degree of acclaim in her native Wales, but sadly only a few of her works are to be found on the internet, and even less is available about her technique and inspiration.

” Eleri lives and works in the same Welsh speaking, rural community in which she was brought up, returning there after study and a period of work in Manchester. The beautiful landscapes that surround this small community are the greatest influence on Eleri’s work. Growing up on a farm, the land has always been integral to Eleri’s life and has instilled in her a strong sense of belonging.

The art of storytelling has significantly shaped Eleri’s work, too, creating imagery in her mind based on mythical and ancient narrative. Eleri creates her pieces through a combination of embroidery and appliqué, layered over a painted canvas.” Wales Arts International

image: In the Hayfields II, Paint, handstitching and applique on cloth by Eleri Mills
Links to other images (painted and/or stitched) by Eleri Mills:
Oriel Arts Centre
BBC
poster for Equilibre

Elizabeth Gomez Freer is a young San Francisco artist whose paintings, silk screen prints and mixed media pieces reflect a world of magical realism and poetic beauty. The women of her paintings, both heroines and peasant girls reside in a world inhabited by nature as portrayed by the Northern Renaissance painters. Unicorns/goats reside peacefully in pens, moths flutter in the moonlight and flowers gracefully adorn the landscape. The colors are intense and hint at an inner life of mystery and depth.

Into this classicism, Gomez Freer injects pop art sensibilities and contemporary young women and children, who seem perplexed and entranced at the state of their world.

In her artist’s statement, Gomez Freer writes:

All my pieces present women interacting with animals, in a juxtaposition that depicts my feelings towards nature and culture. In the natural world the strongest hunts the weaker which in turn hunts the weakest in a strict predator/prey hierarchy. It is a cruel world but one that supports an ongoing balance. The young girls in my work are portrayed at the moment of loss of innocence as they understand that in this world something or someone must die to give way to other life. They come to terms with their natural self.

In other works we meet women that have come to the realization that the life-death cycle that is balanced within nature, is at risk when culture is involved. These women have understood that the natural model of “the survival of the fittest” has jeopardized balance in the cultural world by validating as “natural” episodes of injustice such as men overpowering women or the “have” ruling over the “have nots”.

These women are searching for a new self to harmoniously encompass the natural and the cultural: the ecological self. The old self would be reinvented beyond individual concerns to include the environment. This evolutionary stage of our consciousness requires a more closely integrated relationship between the masculine and the feminine components of the psyche.

Dragonfly Village offers a slideshow of Gomez-Freer’s work.

For the 75th anniversary of American Gothic, Harvard historian and social critic Steven Biel has written a book, American Gothic: A Life of America’s Most Famous Painting. The painting portrays the artist’s sister and his elderly dentist (photo taken in 1942).

Biel summarizes the significance of the image:

“During the Depression, it came to represent endurance in hard times through the quintessential American values of thrift, work, and faith. Later, in television, advertising, politics, and popular culture, American Gothic evolved into parody—all the while remaining a lodestar by which one might measure closeness to or distance from the American heartland.”

NPR’s Melissa Gray offers this audio commentary of American Gothic Gray explores the composition of the work: “The three-pronged pitchfork is one obvious example, but look more closely and you’ll see echoes of the design on the face of the man, the bib of his overalls, and the lines on his shirt. In fact, the straightforward Gothic style extends to the directness of the painting itself… In addition to its architectural connotations, “Gothic” can also mean crude or underdeveloped. It’s an implication Wood was likely aware of when he titled the painting, though it’s unlikely that this was his sole observation about the pair.”
(more…)