Encaustic Week 2011

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Hard to believe that all these months of waiting are nearly over and The Fifth International Encaustic Conference begins THIS WEEK. This is the fifth year that Joanne Mattera, Conference Founder and Director, has brought the conference to us and I have perfect attendence. As you've read me saying for months, the conference will be held in Provincetown this year at the Provincetown Inn on June 3-5. Following that, the festivities move to the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill for a week of post-conference workshops.

This year Joanne has invited me to participate in the Saturday morning panel on Mastering Media. I will be talking about blogging based on my experience with Art in the Studio as well as the two blogs I have set up in conjunction with the conference -- last year's All Info On Art Blogging and this year's Art of Bricolage.

I've been doing research on Art in the Studio to analyze exactly what has happened in the 250+ posts I've published -- who, what and why I wrote what I wrote. I've at least skimmed through every one of those posts and am writing a somewhat sketchy PowerPoint as a guide for speaking about this blog on the panel. Perhaps I'll publish that info here once the conference is over. It's been an interesting study for me to see how my writing and my approach to things have developed over time.

I will be blogging from the conference, as I did last year. This year I have my new Iphone and a mobile blogging app so I'll really be able to go live from wherever I am. Typing on that little Iphone keyboard is not one of my favorite things, so I'll probably just send some pictures. At least something will restrain my usual verbosity.

(I'll be able to look out at this breakwater from my room at the Inn.)

The weather forecast looks really great -- cool and sunny for the most part -- just what I like.

I will also be teaching two all-day post-conference workshops (both the same) at Castle Hill on Making Fine Art With Unconventional Mixed Media and Encaustic. In preparation, I've been writing the Art of Bricolage blog especially for my workshop students. I am pleased to say that Joanne Mattera has signed up for one day, and this will be the first post-conference workshop she has ever been able to attend. Cherie Mittenthal, Executive Director of Castle Hill, and her great staff have taken over the organizing tasks that Joanne usually has to manage.

Photo credit: Ewa Nogiec, iamprovincetown.com

Provincetown is a great place to people watch, dine out and, oh, yeah, look at art. There are three shows in Provincetown organized in conjunction with the conference and featuring work in encaustic:  Kobalt Gallery (Beeline, the conference exhibition) , Ernden Gallery (invitational show of work by gallery artist Deanna Wood along with Milisa Galazzi) and Bowersock Gallery (Art in Motion).

Also, Joanne Mattera and gallery owner Marla Rice have organized a show (Surface Attraction) at Rice Polak Gallery centering on materiality in work by selected gallery artists along with work in encaustic by Joanne Mattera and Lynda Ray.

Photo credit: Ewa Nogiec, iamprovincetown.com

In addition, there is an invitational sculpture show at Castle Hill, curated by Cherie Mitenthal, in which I was invited to participate along with Kim Bernard, Catherine Nash, Miles Conrad and Laura Moriarty. I'm excited to be included with such accomplished artists and to show my encaustic-based work beside theirs.

So look for a surge of posts about the conference with my news and views. My pal Binnie Birstein and I will be driving down to the Cape Friday morning to be there in time for the Monotype Marathon that begins Friday afternoon. All the P-town shows will have openings Friday night and it should be a happening place as 243 (and maybe more) waxers converge at the tip of Cape Cod.

Note: all images in this post are from the internet
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That Emotional Connection

Gateway, 2010, mixed media with encaustic, 24" x 66"

This painting was the first in my Running Stitch series and it has now been sold by Arden Gallery. I am happy to report the sale and thankful for Arden's expertise in marketing. At the same time, because it was the first of this series, I feel a strong connection to it, and seeing it go brings memories of its creation in the studio -- the excitement I felt as it came together and the pleasure it gave me as I added panels and watched it grow. I felt it could have gone on expanding forever. (Note: you can click on pix to see larger views or click here to see a better image on my website.)

Gleaming in late afternoon

Initially, I called this piece itself Running Stitch before I decided that it should be the first in a series of that name. I took the first picture of it in late afternoon as the light changed and made the copper strips in it gleam.

Detail of Gateway showing elements of  patinated copper, rubber, book pages, book covers and more

There were a lot of copper elements in this piece, most of them with a green or blue patina, but some just pure copper, and all set off with black encaustic.

I feel a bittersweet sense of parting from it that doesn't happen with every sale, but only with the pieces for which I feel a special connection. Farewell, Gateway!


Onward and Upward in the Arts
Tomorrow I am packing up my three works for the invitational sculpture show at Castle Hill that will run from May 30-June 9 in conjunction with The Encaustic Conference. This is the first time I have ever made anything that I wanted to be classified as "sculpture" and I am just playing around at the edges of the process. I think my aesthetic really lives somewhere between painting and sculpture in the twilight of 2.5D.

I'm just calling this "Red Piece" for the time being

So this one is "Blue Piece" until I think more about it

I've shown these two pieces on this blog before, but I haven't shown the third piece that will be in the show. That will be a surprise and is the most "sculptural" of the three. The real sculpture is building boxes to pack these pieces into. Fortunately, my very kind studio neighbor, Kathy Jacobs, is delivering them to Truro for me.


News of El Anatsui
After seeing and blogging about Anatsui, one of my most admired artists, at Wellesley College, I began following Professor Chika Okeke-Agulu's blog. Okeke-Agulu is an artist, curator and art historian as well as an assistant professor in the Art and Archeology Department at Princeton, and he participated in the public conversation with Anatsui at Wellesley. I learned so much from his explication of Anatsui's work that I wanted to read what he had to say about contemporary art, particularly from Africa.

El Anatsui, Intermittent Signals, 2009, photo taken at Jack Shainman Gallery, NY, Feb 2010

Today Okeke-Agulu's blog  had a post about Anatsui's show being installed at the Clark Art Institute in their new Stone Hill Center, designed by Tadao Ando. The works are from the Broad Art Foundation's collection. Okeke-Agulu has visited the Clark with Anatsui and on his own to consult on the installation, which he describes as "fabulous" because of the beautiful space designed by Ando. The show will run from June 12 to October 16 at the Clark in Williamstown, MA -- out here in the other side of Massachusetts where I now live. I plan to see the show and to watch the public screening of the new film about Anatsui by Susan Vogel on July 24th, which I posted about here.

His blog also linked to a new book to be published by Yale University Press about Anatsui's show at the Clark. The book is a transcript of a conversation between Anatsui and Okeke-Agulu as well as an essay by Alisa LaGamma, curator in the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the Met.

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As my mother says, never a dull moment.

Artist At Work

One of the big challenges for artists is finding the self motivation to continue making work through all the other demands of life. The endurance needed to keep at it through the rejections, lack of understanding, disparagement from the ignorant, need to have income probably requiring an outside job, financial stress, family obligations, desire to have a social life unrelated to art and all the rest separates the artist from the dabbler. I've been through all that and I've made the commitment to keep going--sometimes at personal cost--but committed despite the cost.

New piece to be shown in the sculpture show at Castle Hill Center for the Arts in Truro, Mass., May 30-June10

Now I find myself in a different place. I am truly and legitimately busy in the studio because there is actual demand for my work! Who would have thought? I have had to draw up a schedule of work that needs to be made in a certain order to meet commitments for shows and deliveries. This is not a problem, by any means, but it does explain why my posts have been limited. I hope you will stick with me and this blog because I will continue to post although maybe on a reduced schedule.

Another piece for the Castle Hill sculpture show

Other Good News
My first sale at Arden Gallery is a commission! I am waiting for the panel to be made for it and will start work as soon as possible.


A Big Sale
I am starting to frame some of the eleven (11) pieces of older work that a consultant just sold to a client. The eleven pieces consist of eight works in encaustic, two works on paper and one oil painting - most from 2007. That year was a very productive one for me although there were not many sales. Now it's very nice to move the work out into the world.


A Little Bad News and a Dilemma
Unfortunately, the oil painting that is part of the sale had a problem that I discovered when I took it off the wall in our house and brought it into the studio. There was this little chip... When I pressed on the area, it felt loose and I started to scrape off the loose part. Before I knew it, most of the painting was becoming detached from the canvas.

Oooo, 2007, oil and cold wax on canvas, 36x36

The dilemma was, should I just try to repaint the loose area or cancel the sale? I chose the third option: I am repainting the picture on a new canvas starting today. I didn't want to send a product out into the world that had some kind of physical defect (that would probably come back to haunt me.) I'm actually looking forward to it because I haven't worked with oil for a while and it should be fun - just paint and no decisions. The questions is, can I really copy my own work? Well, that will be a challenge, but I'm printing out the image in a large format and will see what happens. I may have to paint two paintings - one the way it was and one the way I would paint it now. The artist's life is always a challenge.

Addendum
For those who are curious, I think that the reason the painting cracked was twofold:

1) I had a very dry underpainting underneath
2) I painted with a heavy paste of cold wax medium and oil paint that probably contained too much of the cold wax. The directions say to limit it to 50/50 medium and paint, but I probably exceeded that. Remember: fat over lean? Well, I probably didn't have enough fat for all that lean underneath.

This time I am mixing in a standard oil painting medium of stand oil/turpentine/damar varnish along with the cold wax medium and I am starting on a freshly gessoed canvas. I think that will stick to the canvas a lot better. The piece will look less matte but more juicy.