Live Worms Gallery Show February 2009

I just completed participation in a group show at the Live Worms Gallery in North Beach, in San Francisco, CA.

It was interesting to show in North Beach. Many of the locals know each other - it almost had a small town within a city feel to it. And I really liked that so many people really seem to appreciate art and took lots of time looking at each and every piece in the show, and didn't just breeze through.

The reception was Friday night and it was jammed all night. All kinds of interesting and colorful people. The most common comment heard all night was that many locals thought it was the best show there yet. It was a real great reception.

Saturday also was the Chinese New Year's parade day (and the gallery was just a block from where streets of booths were and where the parade route was on Grant Street). It stopped raining so we got a lot of foot traffic throughout the day on Saturday.

I showed 10 encaustic pieces. People are still quite unfamiliar with the media so I was doing a lot of educating, which was great. The more people learn about encaustic painting, the more people will become comfortable collecting it.

The photo below is my section of the show and the other photos are some of the other work included in the exhibit.

Koi Encaustic Paintings

I finished up a series of 4 12x12" koi encaustic paintings, for a two-month exhibit where all the paintings have to contain an element of water in them. I had never tried to paint fish with hot wax and it was an interesting experience. I can see how the wax media can really lend itself to creating cool water effects. The sketchy look of the fish actually adds to the effect of them being in the water.

Canyon Calls 4 Encaustic Painting

I worked all day yesterday on my recent wax painting in my Canyon Calls series, punctuated by interruptions of trying to upgrade the software I use to host an online community for professional hot glass blowers (quite a unique bunch, they are!).

The upgrade, which I had avoided doing for years, went really smoothly (a testament to careful preparation) but I became so engrossed in the process of doing this latest wax painting that I pretty much forgot to take the in-progress photos I was going to do to show customers the process of making an encaustic painting. I did take one at the beginning and one after I started my "underpainting", but after that I forgot and suddenly it was both the end of the day and the end of the painting. Ooops! I'll have to do a more complete documentation of the process on my next one.

In Canyon Calls 3, I explored a little with reflections at the bottom of a canyon with towering walls. In Canyon Calls 4, I shifted to an image across a canyon valley - Monument Valley to be exact. I'm still working on my skills in working in a kind of representational style in hot beeswax (wax often does just what it wants to do and sometimes I'm not completely in charge [smile]), but I've been finding a sort of minimalist landscape style to be where I want to explore right now.

I'm still working towards my goal of 9 of these so I can display them in a grid 3 across and 3 down, so I'll begin #5 today (which is kind of number 4 because the first one I did was accepted into a nationwide exhibit tour throughout 2008 and is not available for me to show this year).

In the below photos, the first one shows my surface before I begin to add color. Encaustic artists have all different approaches to this - some have very thin initial layers and some thick (like mine). I have 10 clear layers fused together on that piece. I like how the thickness - for this series, makes the final painting really juicy looking.

Some artists paint on the sides, but I've not found a good way of doing that yet (putting the wax there is no problem for me - but heating it with a heat gun and not affecting the top layer or have the sides look "even", well, I'm not good at that yet, so I just choose to tape all the sides with painters tape and remove that at the end for clean wooden sides).

In the second photo, I have my initial layers of color. As mentioned in previous posts, I extensively use a razor blade to scrape, scrape, scrape.

And in the third photo, we jump to the end when I have added about 20 more layers with much scraping back to get the affect.

Canyon Calls 3 Encaustic Painting

I'm continuing my work on my Canyon Calls series of encaustic paintings. Even though these are all 12x12", I'm surprised the amount of labor and attention each one requires. I'm getting handy using a razor blade to carefully scrape back the layers and layers of wax to reveal all kinds of interesting colors and patterns. Hard on the fingers and wrists but rewarding! I'm enjoying it quite a bit. Some of these now have over 50 layers of pigmented beeswax on them. I still like the first one I did in this series the best so far, but I also like the feelings I get when I display them all together.

Something about these images of canyons and wide open spaces also seem to reflect something about our interior canyons of the heart and mind for me.

I've started a fourth one (and am documenting the stages of developing it for a storyboard to show people how at least I construct my encaustics. Every artist has their own process, but I think collectors love to get a little insight into what it takes to make one of these) but my hand got too tired about 1/3rd the way into it (because I had been painting and scraping for over 5 hours yesterday), so the rest is for another day.



You can see more of my encaustic paintings here

or just all my paintings for sale here.

Canyon Calls 2 Encaustic Painting

It seems like it has been so long since I've posted here.

I've been sidetracked by family stuff. My Mom died New Year's Eve and that was a difficult loss, not only because it was my Mom but because it was my last parent to pass. I had a plane ticket all set to go see her in Florida but she died just a couple of days before I arrived.

I rented a studio space in the Mission district of San Francisco and will be using it both as a place to work and also as a commercial gallery. It's small but its right on the street level and the whole front wall is glass. I just had it painted (its a brand new building so my space was just a hollow shell of dry walls and back concrete wall) and I'm having flooring put in this week. So I've been busy preparing the space. It has a tall ceiling which is nice.

I haven't had much time to do art lately, as I go through these life changes, but I did manage to do another encaustic painting this past weekend in my Canyon Calls series that I'm doing (all in 12x12" size). It has over 30 layers of pigmented wax that have been applied and then carefully scraped back with a razor blade. It's tedious work but I like how they are coming out. The first one you'll see in my previous post that I made last December (before all the family stuff got intense). I have two others started and plan to do 9 of them.

Latest Encaustic

Here is my latest completed encaustic painting:



It is called Canyon Calls and is 12x12". It is part of a diptych collaboration project I am participating in. I now send this and a blank wood panel of the same size to an artist I've been partnered with from an East Coast encaustic wax group. She will paint on the blank panel influenced by what I've already done. And she has already done her 12x12" encaustic and sent me her painting and a blank panel and I still need to paint that one influenced by her painting (she did a loosely sketched black and white figurative drawing so painting a matching piece to that will be challenging for me... but given I'm so into color and minimalist landscapes, mine will probably be challenging for her as well). It will be interesting to see how it all turns out.

The two groups have gotten together and already organized 4 or 5 exhibits for all the diptychs in different galleries and other locations around the U.S. throughout 2008. It should be interesting!

Technorati tags: art , encaustic , encaustic painting , diptych

What's Up With the Bees?

I mentioned in my past post that I was thinking about several news articles that came out forecasting the extinction of honeybees.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is the newest affliction to strike the worldwide honeybee population. To date it has been observed in 27 U.S. states, Canada, Brazil, Europe, and possibly Taiwan. CCD is the name given to a specific set of characteristics observed in honeybee colonies that have failed. These characteristics include the absence of dead bees within or around the collapsed hive, a hive that has sufficient stores of honey, developing larvae in combs, and a delayed invasion of honey raiding pests. It has been suggested that bee losses on the west coast of the United States at 60 percent and 70 percent on the east coast.

Recently, a study done at Landau University in Germany showed that cell phones had a negative affect on honeybee hives. Researchers placed cell phones in and near active hives and the bees lost their desire to return to the hive. These results have also been documented in bees that live near power lines. Another theory is that the bees could also be becoming victims to a new unknown parasite. Another problem working against the bees is a reduced gene pool within the honeybee industry. These little guys have a lot stacked against them!

As a person who enjoys painting with pigmented beeswax and even the smell of the beeswax on the painting, I certainly hope these little guys survive. I'm rooting for them. But if it turns out the cellphone theory is correct, I don't know.... I don't see people giving up their cellphones to get their hands on some real honey.

Anyway, all these articles about bees got me thinking about them on all kinds of ways, like how they see, how they measure distance using optical flow (how much an image appears to move as the position of the observer moves), and I just got in the mood to paint bees.

This encaustic (thankfully, still made with 100% natural beeswax) piece is TOTALLY silly and whimsical, but that was the mood I was in today. It's titled, "What's Up With the Bees?"


Technorati tags: art , encaustic , encaustic painting , bees , honeybees

Marin Open Studios May 5-6, 2007

My friend Glynis and I took a field trip up to the Marin Open Studios weekend in Novato at the Hamilton Art Center. There were three buildings that had art in it . Although we came on Sunday and arrived there well after the opening time of 11am, we were kind of surprised at how many artists were not actually in their studios. But we still saw a lot of art.

I know some people there from my encaustics painting group and I grabbed two pictures of the two that were around.

Above is Kathy Knebel from the wax painting group speaking with my friend Glynis.

Above is Sandi Miot from the wax painting group, working bright and early in her studio.

It was amazingly warm and bright and sunny, so Glynis and I drove to Sausalito to eat lunch by the water and everyone was out enjoying the great weather:

And here is a good view of San Francisco from the waterfront at Sausalito:
Everything about the day felt great, the weather, visiting with good friends, seeing good art, getting a perfect parking spot in Sausalito (no easy feat!), getting a table right on the water with no reservations (again, no easy feat on a nice Sunday!), and after lunch found a cool spot on the waterfront to sit in the shade (it was actually too hot in the sun) to just soak up the view and the people and the great weather.

I could not have asked for a better Sunday.



Technorati tags: art , encaustic , Marin Open Studios , Hamilton Art Center