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.
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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”
Hot Wax: And How Did I Get Here?
In 1968 I entered Queens College (CUNY) graduate school in Painting. I had completed a BFA at Wash. U in St. Louis, and I thought at the time “No way do I want to be like a western European male painter”; I don’t want to paint like Cezanne, looking outward, mastering light, form, and space. I want to be making art that comes from my sense of female and body, art “from the inside out.” The surprise came when I actually started doing that (see below, the image where you see folded canvas fabric, brown paper, sand, and paint.) I was just beginning to feel that I was getting somewhere when a faculty committee, all male, told me after my first year that they did not consider me a serious artist, that I should “go home, have babies, and teach grade school.” The year was 1969, right before feminism hit the streets. I was crushed, but by no means destroyed!
I left NYC and continued to make art during an otherwise tumultuous period of my life. It seemed I couldn’t stop. Ten years later, married and with a two year old son, I was in a graduate program at Mass College of Art in Boston. I wanted to find out if I was really an artist, and if not, why was I still making things? Below, you can see a few of the results of my self directed program in which I mapped my psyche using art. I needed to tap the darker side the most, definitely a “grounding” experience. After graduation, armed with a solid sense of my own inner geography, as well as the courage to “bring the inside out,” I created work using fabric, latex, paint, plaster - all kinds of materials - in formats ranging from large scale drawings and paintings, to sculpture, to installation, and to collage.
Fast forward to the 21st century. Included above, you can see two collages, one with a bird, inspired by a trip to Costa Rica in 2002, and another in response to the sensual poetry in the Song of Songs. The latter piece was created at VCCA in 2003, the very same month that I visited the studio of an artist working with encaustic paint. Below are some examples of paintings I have done since that time, all using pigmented beeswax and damar resin, also called encaustic, also called “Hot Wax.” All of these result from a deep response to a poem, to a resonant place, to a memory, or to a sense of what is beneath the surface of nature. All are a part of me, shared.
When Stones Speak
I really don’t know when I started responding to stone as if it were a living substance. I have always picked up shiny stones on the beach, and pocketed faceted rocks that I find on a woods walk. I love to see walls built of stone, especially uneven stone, stone that has been softened by wind and water and age.
A new and more overpowering response to stone began last August, when I encountered some giant boulders on a trail at Big Bear Lake State Park near L.A. I could feel their quiet presence, looming up from the earth, seeming to speak about something deeper than deep, and older than old. I leaned against them, my hands on the textured roughness. I wanted to stick around. They seemed oddly nurturant, like a parent I could count on - like “Mother Earth” would be. And in fact, they ARE Mother Earth.
Then something even more mind boggling happened. My travel dreams keep manifesting, and in January Carl and I traveled all the way to Barcelona to see the architecture of Antonio Gaudi. I had waited 50 years, since my sophomore year in art school, to see his curvy colorful outrageous work. And finally I did. We visited the amazing Casa Sagrada Familia, the mansions on the main streets, and the prize Gaudi experience, the monastery like structure at Parc Guell. Built from the local stone, it was a magical place - it seemed as if the earth had come alive and the stones rose up dancing and placed themselves just right, to create a sacred space.
When stones speak, I hear them. I have no idea whether others do. They seem to pass right by, not noticing. But I could not walk by, I had to stop, to listen, to touch, and to photograph. On the oldest streets of Barcelona, of Girona and Sitges. I heard them everywhere. They made up the walls of buildings, the walls around buildings, the enclosures, the churches, the hidden synagogues. I really cannot describe my response, but I can say that it was profound. Perhaps you can sense that here, and even more so when you are with the paintings that resulted.
Travel to Hawaii
I had two big travel dreams that seemed to go back to some distant vision of what “far away” meant. One was Alaska. One was Hawaii. As it got close to planning the Hawaii trip, I tried to recall more of why I wanted to go there. Logistics are hard and I needed a new reason. I thought and thought, and then I remembered a friend, perhaps in college, telling me that the Hawaiian Islands had a fragrance and the spiritual presence of a goddess, and that once you were there you would not want to leave.
Sure enough, she was correct. There is a feeling, at least where we went on the Big Island, that is indescribable. I will share a few photos, and a painting inspired by a walk over black lava rock to the “black sand beach” of Pahoa.
Pahoa
encaustic (pigmented beeswax and damar resin) on wood, 18”x18”
