I loved this 3D piece by Toby Sasson, an important new member of New England Wax. (Yes, all NEW members are important but I meant this in a particular way - see Comments on this post for my explanation.)
Sorry I don't have time to post more photos and to identify individual artists, but more later. Joanne Mattera is to choose the Director's Award from this show, and I don't envy her. The quality and diversity of the work that has been hung is just fabulous. It's wonderful to see all in one place how wide-ranging the interests and excellence of the work of conferees. Everyone is raving about it.
The day didn't officially start until the first talk began at 1:00 p.m., but the vendor tables opened at 10:00 and many conferees took the opportunity to get a jump on the crowd and go shopping. Of course I was among them and got some paint from Evans Encaustics, some paintsticks on sale at RandF paint and a signed copy of Daniella Woolf's new book, Encaustic With a Textile Sensibility. I went back in the afternoon to get four of the giant spatulas that Kama Pigments was selling and a bottle of Miles Conrad's new non-toxic wax solvent. Don't you just love shopping for art materials?
We had a superb talk last night about Jasper Johns by Dr. Roberta Bernstein, who is THE authority on his work and is completing the Catalogue Raisonne of the Paintings and Sculptures of Jasper Johns to be published in 2012. She has known Johns personally since the 1960s, wrote her Ph.D. dissertation about him and thoroughly understands the important role that the encaustic medium played in the development of his work. What a treat to her her talk from the perspective of encaustic! More about her talk later because I took photos of the slides she showed and despite the distance and low light situation, many of them came through clearly enough to post.
So there is much more to come. It's hard to tear myself away from real time to dabble in the virtual. I love blogging but reality is such a concept.
