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Ooh! This is fun… a collage machine!

Thanks to my dear friend Katia for the link.

It’s an honor and a pleasure to announce that Sister Bee is screening in St Louis, Missouri tonight, January 26th as part of the Slow Food St. Louis Urban Homesteading Series.

Those of you arriving here via the Montserrat Encaustic Conference blog, welcome! It’s a joy to connect with you. I write about beeswax, honeybees and painting from an appreciative and (hopefully) curious point of view. Your comments are always welcome.

The last few weeks have found me blogging about a Wayne Theibaud interview transcript (here and here). Thiebaud’s supportive yet rigorous attitude toward painting as an endeavor worthy of spending one’s life on inspires me. He’s for painting with awareness of the world around you; an understanding of how your work fits in; and the ability to assess your own work and receive feedback and inspiration from your friends.

According to Thiebaud being a painter, a relevant painter, means participating in the conversation about what painting is. It’s a yearning for painterly conversation that draws me to the conference and spurred to me to make Wax Fetish, the talk/slide show I’m giving at on Sunday, 6/13. My hope is to elaborate on what many of us intuitively know about beeswax but have a hard time saying. That it’s important. That it has something to do with the body. And how neatly it fits into the story art tells about human beings.

Please, join in the fun.

(023) Wax Fetish: Beeswax, Materialism and Encaustic Paint
Talk: Yes, beeswax is beautiful! But have you ever wondered, beyond beauty, what your art is about? Wax has physical and symbolic properties that engender a cult-like appreciation. Find out more about why beeswax is special and how art made with it refers to the viewer’s body in this image-rich talk about encaustic painting that draws on art history, experimental film, philosophy and honeybee biology.
Level: All

Presenter Laura Tyler uses encaustic to make elemental, abstract images of plants and animals. She is the producer and director of the documentary film, Sister Bee and speaks nationally about beekeeping and honeybees. She earned a BFA in filmmaking from the Massachusetts College of Art and is a co-founder of the Boulder, Colorado, based honey company, Backyard Bees. She is a lover of sunlight, flowers and alizarin orange.

The Road, encaustic and ink on panel, 20″ x 16″

A new painting. The subject was a dill plant and while making it I had a reverie about plants growing up in a landscape of wildly abandoned concrete. The white band along the bottom is what makes this a painting and not a drawing, to me.

Here’s another gem from the Thiebaud transcript. When asked why such a high percentage of art students never go on be artists, he says:

Well, it’s too damn difficult and too painful on the one hand. I think it’s a kind of neurosis. You have to give up a lot to gain a little. There are no guaranteed results. Those are not good options for a life. But if you are willing to make a life out of it, if you can learn to hope for the best and be prepared for the worst, and see the painting itself as an extraordinary human invention, that becomes enough for you. Going to museums, taking it on, loving what you’re doing, conditioned to the failures, getting some good instruction and critical reaction, which has nothing to do with success but… with a realization of where you are, what kind of progress you’re making… and to form … a kind of community of your own with some of the people, whether it’s one other person or a group of people. Those groups represent a kind of balancing act where you can have some kind of frank, honest confrontation and some sort of shared, communal love and a series of responses; then you’re going to be okay…

And another…

Try and avoid becoming what I might refer to and an “art wold employee” where you develop these products of commercial value, where you manufacture some kind of product. That’s not what painting is about. Painting is about, for me, research, confrontation, taking risks, going on and trying to challenge yourself to get better always… It has to do really with some kind of self confrontation, continuously…

Challenges wrapped in encouragement. May they inspire.

Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.

- John Muir