Call for Art - Pick Up The Pieces Show

The Conrad Wilde Gallery in Tucson is calling for donations of art in any medium with a maximum size of 16" x 16" to be sold in their Red Dot "Pick Up the Pieces" show running at the gallery from May 1 through May 29th. Work will be priced below market value for quick sale to benefit artists whose work was stolen from the gallery at the end of March. Get full details at the gallery's website: http://www.conradwildegallery.com/

Back Story
For five years the Conrad Wilde Gallery in Tucson has been hosting an annual encaustic invitational show. This year was the first time that I submitted work and it was accepted for the Fifth Annual Encaustic Invitational in February. Some time after the show closed on Saturday night, March 26th, the gallery was burglarized. Not only were all their computers and electronic equipment stolen, but so were 13 paintings from the show. The gallery had self insured the artists' work, meaning that they guaranteed to reimburse the artists for their work if anything happened to it while it was in their care.

"Redacted" - one of the recovered paintings.

"Tale of Shadows" also recovered.

The gallery offered a reward for the no-questions-asked return of the paintings, and a few days after the theft, they got a call that alerted them to three paintings that had been left in an alley. Two of those were my paintings. They are slightly damaged, according to Miles Conrad, but probably can be repaired without too much trouble. Deanna Woods' piece was the third piece found, and I don't know the state that it was in. So there are still 10 paintings missing. Here's the link showing them all: http://www.conradwildegallery.com/returnthepaintings.html If you should happen to see any of them, please alert the gallery.

Meanwhile, please take a look around your studio and see if you have some small pieces that you can donate to the gallery. This is really a worthwhile cause. The Conrad Wilde Gallery is a small but influential gallery run by really fine people. Please help them and the artists whose work was stolen to recover from this contemptible theft.

Love in a Tiny Package

Wow, the excitement! My new teeny, tiny, little camera is so adorably cute that I am blown away by the huge, brilliant photos it takes - plus it's so quiet. All these things are something my old digital camera is not or does not do. The difference is phenomenal.

I really haven't had time to play with it, but I was in the studio today packing up my pieces to send to Tucson for the 5th Annual Encaustic Invitational at Conrad Wilde Gallery, and I shot a few photos of the work before it went out the door.

Here is the front of the card for the show - just a little plug.

Anyway, here is Tale of Shadows, encaustic and mixed media on two joined panels, 21" H x 12" W as photographed by my old camera. (By the way, all these shots will open a page for a larger image if you click on them.)

And here it is below as photographed by the new camera:

Amazing, right?

Here are a couple of other shots of this piece.

From the side showing the rubber around the edges.

At an angle showing the front and side.


Now here is the second piece, Redacted Memory, same materials and size as the first. The shot below is from the old camera:

Now here's the same shot from the new camera:

It doesn't even look like the same piece, does it? I actually think the second shot is too light. The first one has a lot more mystery - mainly because you can't quite see anything!

Here is just one more shot of Redacted Memory:

This is just the "book" at the top of the piece with rubber redacting the words from the pages underneath.

All these photos were taken in my studio with just overhead daylight fluorescents and no flash. There was light coming in through the window but it was a very dark day today and late afternoon around 4:00.

This whiz of a camera is the Canon PowerShot SD780 IS. I don't know what all the initials are but you can just call it the 780. This is actually last year's camera, I think, because the new one is the 880. This one is 12.1 mega pixels. My old camera was 5.5 megapixels and cost way more. I got a good deal on this at Best Buy in a package that included the discounted camera, a 4GB memory card, a spare battery and a carrying case - all for $239.95 plus tax. Wow! I paid nearly $900 for my last camera about 4-5 years ago.

I got this camera so I would have it for my trip to New York and could take all those stealth gallery photos. Looks like I better practice up before I start going stealth because I don't know how to use it effectively yet and these photos above were just taken with the nothing special manual setting (rather than with all the auto gadgets that recognize faces, etc.). It's so great to have a tiny new toy! Color me mighty pleased.

Powering Up

I'm working on my Power Point presentation about encaustic for the Smith College class in Historic Methods and Materials. The 8-10 students are coming to my studio next Tuesday for a demonstration of encaustic painting and then we'll go over to Smith so I can show my PP. On Thursday they will come back and experiment with the medium themselves.

Artists painting a sculpture of Herakles, Red Figure Apulian Column Krater.
GREEK Anonymous , 4th BCE Greek Classic Ceramics
Earthenware | Italy. | New York. Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

I was finally able to get this picture from a classical Greek vase dug up in Italy . The image appears on the cover of the 13th edition of Gardner's Art Through the Ages, as I saw on Amazon, but I couldn't get it from there. Neither did it turn up on the searches I made of the Metropolitan Museum which now owns the vase.  Google eventually found it at  gallery.sjsu.edu/arth198/painting/encaustic.html. Where would we be without Google?

Here is the painter's nude assistant manning the charcoal brazier containing cylinders of molten encaustic and heated tools.

And on the other side of the statue, the bearded artist applies the paint to Herakles's lion skin cloak.

I also found an image of these tools, called cauteria in the plural (cauterium, singular), that were used to apply and smooth the wax.


I wish I knew who the figure was that is shown above the assistant. I guess it must be the god Herakles (also known as Hercules) watching his statue get painted. I didn't think that Hercules was a god, but I just read up on him and found that he was the son of Zeus and a mortal woman and so was a god. (Note: one of our dogs is named Hercules and we treat him like a god.)


Addendum: Joanne Mattera sent me some images she took of this vase at the Metropolitan Museum. These are just great for getting a sense of the size of the piece and clarity of the images.

When you look at these images, you can see that it is Daddy Zeus above the assistant on the left and then Herakles (Hercules) in the flesh looking on at the painting from the right.

You can tell it's him because of the lionskin cloak and the club.

A very big thank you to Joanne for sending me these irreplaceable images of what is believed to be the only depiction of an encaustic painter plying his trade on a statue.

_________________________________________________________________________

On another note...

So encaustic is much on my mind, and looky here, what I got via email:

I am so happy to be included in this show and to have an image (cropped) of my work appear on the card and in the press release. I wish I could go to Tucson for the opening but it's not in the cards right now. Maybe next time. The wonder of it all is that I know just about every one of the artists included in the show thanks to the encaustic conference. And of course I know Miles Conrad from the conference, too. That is such a nice feeling to be among friends even in absentia.