Victoria Fenninger looks at one of my encaustic paintings.
Encaustic on canvas. When working with texture, it is hard to avoid encaustic, it is a wonderful medium.
The Texture Series I had been working on let me towards appreciating the value of unique supports for a painting. For a while, I would head down to a wood shop and raid the scrap bin, looking for random chunks of wood to assemble into interesting shapes to coat with globs of paint.
By the end of this series, I was struggling to keep pure textures interesting, leading me to really work the surfaces. Sometimes, I would scrape the wax down o a flat surface. Other times, I would brush paint over the same area hundreds of time, building up interesting textures.
This painting doesn’t fit with the rest of the show, to be perfectly honest, it was thrown in as a space filler. Y.O. Media Gallery had a very large front window, and we liked to put something big close to that window, to draw people into the gallery. I was also still fairly young at the time, and the importance of having a strong focus and cohesive body of work in a show hadn’t sunk in yet. I was still throwing together whatever I had been working on at the time. I could see that there was something special in this piece, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I had several big ones to chose from, but something had me sort through the stack and pick this one. Little did I know that this painting would mark a turning point in my artistic development.
Event Documentation
