Reality Show

I was in the studio today scraping down an encaustic painting to the bare panel and thinking how great encaustic is to work with. There is no other medium that can be totally reversed the way encaustic can, and that's a great thing for reworking paintings that ultimately don't make the cut.

And after working with oil paint last week, I realized again how messy oil cleanup is compared to encaustic. With encaustic, I can just unplug, clean off my hands with vegetable oil and sayonara.

But of course, everything is relative.

If you've never worked with encaustic and/or only know it from looking at instruction books, you probably think it looks like this.

So neat, so clean and so totally staged. (You can tell that this was taken a long time ago because my heat gun is still aqua and the rubber tree is still alive.)

In the foreground of this fairly neat looking table are some of the lovely wax balls that scraping paintings makes.

But tthis is more the reality - wax everywhere, heat gun turned grey from wax buildup and table barely visible.

Wax drippings everywhere you look.

And the floor is basically rising around the painting area.

When I walk from the painting area to the woodworking area where the wax on my shoes picks up the sawdust, I know I'm really becoming part of the process.

But that's life in the studio.

Valley of Indecision

Sorry I've been MIA for a few days. Life got in the way.

But I've been in the studio working a bit. And here's a new diptych that I'm calling "Masquerade." It's encaustic with roots and beads on two panels - each panel 16"x16"x1.5". These are panels that I made myself. I think I should reshoot the photo because the panels look distorted. They really are square - honest!

My friend Sue told me that I should try for more color subtlety but that's a lost cause. These colors are subtle enough for me although I did have trouble with them because of the warm palette. I'm much more comfortable with cool colors.

So here's my problem: I made another diptych in orange, etc. that I really wasn't happy with. It's probably too much information, but here are three versions:

Version 1 - encaustic with roots, toothpicks and leaves. I didn't really think that the two panels had enough connection except for the color, so I made...

Version 2 - in which I turned the first panel on its side and extended the lines. But I thought this made it look too much like balloons or boobs, so then I...

Version 3 - turned the panels around. But then I thought it was kind of boring and not really like my work.

So, reader, I scraped.

That's the wonderful thing about encaustic - just heat it up and scrape away. All your indecisions, bad decisions, and misdirections just end up in balls of wax and you start over with nice, clean panels.

My Bowl of Balls in the display window at my last show.

I'll let you know how things turn out with Version 4.

Surprise - Happy New Year!

Wow, I forgot I even made this blog. What a surprise. Who knows what else I've forgotten?

So the last day of 2008 - not a bad year for me - how about you? Millions hurt but I had no money to lose and no house to buy or sell. I guess that's success, as redefined these days. I laughed, I cried, celebrated, mourned, all that stuff. I made a lot of work and sold some of it.

I was looking at that pristine view of the new studio I posted initially before I started to work in it. I actually took a few photos last week of the way it looks now, a couple of years later. These are three current views.

Lots of mess but lots of work, too.

It's amazing how much stuff it takes to paint a few pictures. It starts with a selection of canvases, but you have to have bubblewrap for everything and many paints and brushes and tools. Then you move on to panels so you need wood and a saw - maybe two saws - and more tools to add to the brushes, paints, cleaners, etc., etc. And if you work in more than one medium, you need all those supplies. Of course you have completed work and books about other artists. No end to it all. No wonder stuff always expands to fill any size studio.

I was reading about Sean Scully and the buildings he owns for his studios - thousands of feet. I could fill those easily.

I could probably fill those thousands of feet just with wax balls. When will I ever use them? They do make a nice centerpiece for Thanksgiving Dinner.

Being messy is one of the reasons that encaustic appeals to me. Amazing that such glossy, pristine-looking work can come from a mess like this. What fun!