Going With the Flow

Two exhibits in Wellfleet filled May and June last year, and a quick but refreshing trip to Mill Valley in California ended the summer. I was in my studio once again….. and what now? I had gathered a few more resonant twigs and bits of the natural world, and again had the feeling of something needing to come from them being in my hands. Again I went to encaustic to build out what I felt should happen with the twigs and bits.

Something kept happening, and I followed it. I recalled the feeling I’d had, drawing onto raw canvas, using bits of text and hints of twigs. Connections were being made somewhere in my brain, and when I looked at my work table …… I started to “give voice” to them.

An Art Full Year

2023 began with a bang, as I was notified that my exhibit for the Wellfleet Public Library was accepted. Not only accepted, but eagerly anticipated. I had proposed new and experimental work, all of it extensions of the slowing down I had begun months earlier. By January 2023 I was deeply into the process, putting things together that made sense on an intuitive level..

I wrapped twigs, combined them with bones and cloth, and built small and precarious sculptures. I was reminded of a Jewish legend about the birth of Abraham.

In the story an evil king, Nimrod, decreed that all the newborn Jewish males should be killed. Abe’s mother hid in a cave to give birth. She wrapped him in her garment and left, thinking it better to leave him than subject him to murder. What happened? God sent the angel Gabriel down and the angel taught the baby Abraham to nurse from his own little finger. The child survived….. and the story continued….

Some themes recur. They appear as if from nowhere, and come into and through my hands, through my work. Danger, birth, flesh, spirit. Big ideas, here in intimate scale.

The Wisdom of Slowing Down

It was the end of May in 2022 when our son and family came down to visit. Lowe was not yet 5, and her pace during our walk along Sligo Creek was just right. She communicated with a tiny caterpillar, made a home for it with a leaf, and set the tone I needed. We meandered slowly along a path of wood chips. I began to pick up twigs and small shapes of wood that “called to me.”

I was reminded, as I collected and placed more and more twigs and bits of wood on my studio table, that I often clean and lay out chicken bones in my kitchen. There is something about the rhythm, and the similarity to letters and symbols…. Bit by bit I walked, collected, placed, contemplated, and organized my treasures in different ways. I would choose one, hold it in my hand, and wait for a sense of what it needed. If it needed smoothing I would wrap it with plaster gauze, then smooth more with spackle, then paint with layers of encaustic. Slowing down had opened up a new well.

Interview with Carolivia Herron

Interview on WOWD with Carolivia Herron, December 5, 2023. In three parts, each about 15 minutes.

My statement from the May 2023 Remnants exhibit was read powerfully and beautifully by Carolivia Herron on Epic City.

Support

IN the Yellow Chair Salon. Finally. We met every couple of weeks on zoom. I met artists who were open to my earlier “radical and unpalatable” subject matter and approach, as well as where I was now. I wanted to recover and reclaim what I had decided was “past” and to somehow bring that into the present. I had no good ideas but I had a sense.

My first salon group members suggested I consider softening the edges of my paintings. How? They could see my proclivities to organic forms and tactility. Their focus was on helping me to deepen, clarify, and strengthen my work. Wow. I took a deep breath and dove in. Within a few months I had let go of painting only on rectangular supports. I used my hands more, building and shaping. Bones, teeth, cheesecloth, other materials I had used decades ago began to reappear in the work.

Shifting Gears

Sometime in 2021 my work with lichen slowed. The pandemic had originally spurred it on, as I walked on every street and path in my area. It was everywhere, and I needed to see beauty. It was beauty and I needed to paint it. And then a shift occurred.

I was in that space where “waiting” was all I could do. - When time that seems like a desert, but you suspect something is brewing. It was. Turned out I needed people. People on my wave length in some new way. I joined the Yellow Chair Salon, complete with a mentor and supportive serious artists. Just what I needed!

I had been focussed on nature around me since 2009. I was ready to try something new, preferably “scary” or a stretch for me. I needed to grow. I decided to paint my aging skin. Here are a few of the first bunch. Some cross the boundary - human skin, the skin (bark) of trees, the skin (aerial view) of earth. Almost reminds me of my latex “skins” from the late 80’s, embedded with bone, sand, and yarns, sometimes morphing into landscapes. Amazing.

Liking Lichen

It is 2021 and I am not sure when it began - that first time I responded to these strange spots and splotches attached to tree trunks and rocks, old wooden fences, wet concrete, and fallen branches. I need to search my photos, see if I can find any that are so old that I have to rephotograph them. I try to think about it - what is it that attracts me? Is it the shock of the color or the value against a background? Is it the way there seems to be SO MANY repetitions of a shape, a dot, a splotch, something that looks like miniature lettuce? Is it the mystery of how they got here - with no roots? I have a sense that they are ancient, like ferns. I will look into it.

Wikipedia tells me: Lichens may be long-lived, with some considered to be among the oldest living organisms. Lifespan is difficult to measure because what defines the "same" individual lichen is not precise. Lichens grow by vegetatively breaking off a piece, which may or may not be defined as the "same" lichen, and two lichens can merge, then becoming the "same" lichen. An Arctic species called "map lichen" has been dated at 8,600 years, apparently the world's oldest living organism.

I am thinking about living things, all living things. I see lichen on stones, pink lichen, yellow dot lichen. I can’t stop painting it and its variations. Growth and change is everywhere. There is movement and interaction on every plane in every way. I think about the film “The Powers of Ten.” My body, the lichen “body,” the Earth’s body. The big picture and looking closely.

Why I Love to Paint With Encaustic

Artists love their tools, their media. Every one has reasons, the way a tool fits into the hand, the way it can attack or caress the surface, a way the medium flows, or offers resistance. Many artists use encaustic, and write about all the wonderful qualities it has. Below is a piece that shows some of what I love about working with this magical medium, and why I stick with it even as my vision shifts.

Barnacles, encaustic on wood, 16” x 16”

Encaustic is a sensual medium. Its base is beeswax, and it has the fragrance, when heated, of sweet honey. It is heated on a hot surface until it flows like melted butter, or like heavy cream. I can paint with it directly using a warm brush, use a special tool to draw with it, sometimes even pour it. I can in fact do anything I can think of, the caveat being that I need to RE heat it to be sure it attaches physically to whatever is underneath.

Encaustic has body. In art school they always talked about the “body” of the oil paint. Encaustic has this quality big time for me. I can build it up in layers, stencil shapes onto it, draw and carve into it, push things into it (see Barnacles, where I pushed a shell into the built up wax), add things like bits of sea glass or sand or powdered pigment or - all kinds of things!

Encaustic is flexible; With it I can make mistakes. When I was making huge charcoal drawings in the 1980’s, one of my favorite qualities of the charcoal was that I could easily erase it! I could wipe it off with a cloth, and adjust where I put a line or a shape. With encaustic I can scrape off a layer or more of paint, or cover over the whole painting and then reveal some of what’s going on under that. I can build. I can excavate. I can smooth the surface with heat.

Encaustic is luminous. I have a few cherished memories of places that I loved to hang out as a young child. One such spot for me was right under the tiffany lamp at my grandmother Sophie’s house. Whenever I sat there I felt warm and cared for by the feeling of the color and light shining onto me. Sometimes encaustic looks just like stained glass.

Encaustic can get out of control. That may sound odd, and why would I like that quality? In my life I love having control. I hate when things (as they often do) get “out of control.” But with hot wax? I love that part of it - that I can heat the wax to be like I want it to be, but sure enough, it has a mind of its own. It will flow somewhere unexpectedly, or do wonderful things that are a total surprise, that I could not have planned. Working with it allows me to work in a trancelike state, to be in the “zone,” where I don’t know what I am doing, but the wax knows. SOMEthing knows. SOMEone knows.

Red Horizon, encaustic on wood, 10” x10”