Road Trip

It's a lovely day  in St. John's as I put the finishing touches on my packing.  We're  setting  out for our 10 hour drive across the province to get the ferry to Nova Scotia.  Not my favourite part of this trip, but very necessary when you leave from the east side of NL.  It will take us three long days of driving to reach Boston  where I'm staying for three days before leaving for Provincetown and the encaustic conference and a two day workshop.Of course there will be tons of art viewing along the way.

 I have high hopes of coming back from this trip ready to create again.  My mind has already leaped ahead to a new series of work which will result in an exhibition.  I think Surfacing is a perfect title for my new series.

 

The image above is work number one and it's already at The Leyton Gallery.   I feel like the real me is surfacing again after all my health woes of the last six months.  Bring it on!

Where did April go?

I can't believe it  is almost May and I haven't posted in a month.  I'm also not reading about art and thus my absence in blogland.  I seldom go to the studio these days because I seem to have lost all interest in creating.  Am I worried about this? Not really.  I've had other times when I've felt this way and my inspiration has returned.

 I'm hoping my attendance at the International Encaustic Conference in Provincetown NJ at the end of May will ignite me again.  I thoroughly enjoyed the conference last year and came away with all types of things I wanted to experiment with.  This year I'm excited about a two day post conference  workshop with Catherine Nash that explores using paper with encaustic. It's a perfect fit for me because I already use lots of paper in my mixed media works.

I like Catherine's artist statement because her beliefs are similar to my own.

Creating images and objects of beauty and visual poetry that express reverence offers me grounding.  Enough time has passed by in my creative life to notice that I spiral through ideas and concerns.  I discover tiny roots of an idea were hidden in previous works, but have emerged in a different way.  Completely understanding a narrative while creating is not important. I’ve learned to not question the internal juxtaposition of imagery, to listen and let the work lead me.  A conversation with paper, wax, branches, brush, pen, saw and twine.

 Boat of Myself

Mixed media encaustic painting, 150 year old Japanese paper bought in a Kyoto flea market. Poem by Jelaluddin Rumi. 12” X 15”

Her work is diverse and often forays into three dimensional pieces.  Take a look.  I'm sure you'll be hearing more about her and the workshop. 

An approach to painting sides

 I've made my decisions about how to paint the sides of the cradled panels I mounted my recent encaustic monotypes on.  I

 This is one of a series of four

 

Getting ready to go 

 First I mixed a darker grayed purple and painted the sides.  When it dried it was more purple than I wanted and looked harsh with the greens.  

Added gray but it was difficult to cut the purple so I had to take another approach.

Then I mixed neutral gray with a tad of purple and got a gray with a purple undertone right).  I mixed this with lots of gloss medium and brushed it on over the original purple to get a much more grayed effect that I found pleasing.

 The colour match was good but there's something about all that purple that detracts from the image. Now I'm thinking it needs to be even grayer.  I'm letting it rest for awhile.  Of course when it is hung on the wall the edges aren't as obvious.

 One from the second series all with the same colour scheme.

 

 First I mixed a cadmium red light toned a bit for the edges and painted them all. Garish!!

 Then I mixed a match for the blue green and painted all the sides.  Better than the orange but it was still too bright. So I tried the same approach with this lot.  I used a neutral gray and added a bit of cobalt turquoise to it (left below) .

 

You can see the difference in the two colours . The grayed one is much less distracting.

 I'm wondering if I should just mix the gray with a slight undertone of the dominant colour and be done with it. Any amount of the dominant colour appears too bold when it dries.   The sides would  then all be some version of gray.   What do you think?