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.

Concrete Spheres

I took an interesting class on making sculptures using a type of concrete called acrylic concrete, which when made over an armature comes out pretty darn light-weight, for concrete. It is typically used on the outside of buildings (because it's a little more malleable than regular concrete, as a building settles and may crack, this type of concrete can handle a little movement without cracking) and in under-developed countries.

The class focused on making a sphere, which is the hardest shape to do, but any armature can be used - square or an animal shape or whatever.

The acrylic concrete is made into a liquidy slip-like material (for those who do clay, this terminology is familiar) and cut up strips of fiberglass meshing is used to give the concrete something to adhere to and build a strong structure.

Our armature was actually an inflated rubber ball, which can be of any size. When covered with two layers of fiberglass mesh - a fist-size hole is left at the bottom where the pin hole is on the rubber ball and after the concrete sets, the ball is deflated and removed through the hole. Then we used more fiberglass mesh to cover up the hole (which was hard because there was no longer an armature underneath to support it). When that was set, an more liquidy slip was used with a brush to smooth the surface and then it was all allowed to dry. It usually only takes hours but it rained that weekend so ours took longer.

Most students were going to then use their spheres to mosaic on top of them, which did look very cool, but I wanted to try encaustics on mine. Realizing this type of concrete had acrylic in it (wax does not adhere to plastics and acrylic is a form of plastics), I first had to gesso my sphere with non-acrylic based gesso.

I then added maybe over 20 layers of wax, using clear first, then oranges and yellows with a little blue (which turned out to look green under the yellow layers) and kept fusing lightly between layers with my heat gun. It began to look like the sun to me. I decided to call the piece "Solar Energy" and it will stand on a nice glass bowl support underneath.

It was an interesting and different project. I love exploring completely new mediums like that. I can see where it could get interesting with embedding things into the wax and exploring shapes other than the sphere.

Below, you will see an example of what the globes look like when they are first drying (and you can even see the blue ball inside one of them because their exposed area on the sphere is showing), a photo of how my sphere looked when the concrete was dry, and a photo of how mine looked with the encaustic layers on it.






Technorati tags: art , encaustics , beeswax , concrete forms