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New paintings. These are in the same vein of the work I did last summer, though more raw and saturated. These three remind me of animals.

Tusk, encaustic and ink on panel, 5″ x 4″

Using a new pigment here, Burnt Scarlet from R&F.

Serpent, encaustic and ink on panel, 5″ x 4″

This one, Chalice, could be a cup or a snout/trunk.

Chalice, encaustic, gold leaf and ink on panel, 5″ x 4″

I love white encaustic.

My friend and colleague Monika Edgar designed this postcard for our show coming up in Louisville, Colorado next Friday. It was a challenge getting two images of such different scale to work together on one card. (Her fairy tale images are 48 x 24.” My beeswax abstractions of plants and flowers are 5 x 4.”) But she did a great job, I think.

The opening is coinciding with the Louisville Street Faire, a small town food and music fest, so there will lots to do and see should you choose to stop by. There’s a nice little arts community budding in Louisville. If you’re in Colorado it’s worth checking out.

“A ballsy choice!”

That’s what co-exhibitor David A. Clark said about juror, Joseph Carroll’s decision to give these three paintings a wall of their own at Flow & Control. I agree. It was ballsy choice and as the artist it was thrilling.

Three paintings anchoring the main wall at Montserrat’s 301 Gallery

I have a large gesture. It’s my tendency to draw things larger than they appear in life. Encaustic, however, encourages smallness. The paint cools quickly and it’s not unheard of for it to harden mid-stroke. Though it’s possible to work large in wax, I have better success rate, more of my paintings get completed successfully, when I keep my panels small.

Three paintings, 5″ x 4″

I knew when I shipped these pieces there was a chance they’d get relegated to smaller wall in a supporting role, especially if the show was more crowded or arranged more timidly. That’s the chance one takes when submitting diminutive paintings.

“Old Fashioned Rocketry,” “Castle,” and “Rainforesty”

Though small in size, my paintings read large (an inheritance from the drawings they started as, I suppose). I am thankful to Mr. Carroll for boldly giving them a wall of their own.

Though you can’t see them in the above image, the two pieces that hung on the wall to the right are wonderful. Hot and cold glyphs by Michele Thrane.

Ooh! Have you seen the new Ab-Ex postage stamps at the USPS? I just picked up a sheet and man, oh, man. They are they great. Love the enormous Pollock stamp. Motherwell, too. Other artists on the sheet are Hans Hoffman, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, Clyfford Still, Joan Mitchell, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman.

Interesting to see Gorky getting his due. (I think the de Kooning biography had a role to play in that, don’t you?) And I’m wondering, if they included Joan Mitchell, why they didn’t include Helen Frankenthaler, too? Had they chosen two women instead of just one it would have seemed less like a token.

There’s a good interview with Pamela T. Boll, director of “Who Does She Think She Is?” at Salon.

A choice quote:

“… In the arts, there’s no guarantee for success. Even if you’re working at Wal-Mart, if you show up, you get paid. In the studio, you don’t. It’s very risky business. You have to create your own life and have a very strong understanding about what your have to offer. There will be a lot of people telling you that you’re just fooling around. Society just doesn’t consider an artist’s work as “work” — just like motherhood isn’t often acknowledged as being real work.”

Do you have a favorite pair of socks? I sure do and they’re made by Smartwool. So it’s a joy to let you know I’m collaborating with Smartwool on their Fall 2011 line of gallery socks. We’re knee-deep in the design process having recently chosen images and colors. The finished socks bearing images from my current gallery and archive will be ready for retail in July 2011.

Can you guess which paintings we’ve chosen?

Gallerist Joseph Carroll chose works by ten artists to show at Flow & Control, the juried show happening at the Fourth Annual Encaustic Conference in June. I am honored and delighted to be included. The other nine are:

Jill Skupin Birkholeder
David A. Clark
Shelley Gilchrist
Ken Gold
Ruth Hiller
Nancy Lowe
Kelly Steinke
Michele Thrane
Robin Van Hoozer

Beginning Encaustic
Date: Saturday, May 15th, 2010
Time: 1:00 to 4:30pm
Place: Studio Monika, Louisville, Colorado
Cost: $125, includes materials
Details: Class is full. Please email me to get on waiting list.

Soft Flower, encaustic and ink on panel, 5″ x 4″

I made this imaginary flower last winter during one of those bitter weeks when spring seems so far off as to be impossible. Now, here we are! It’s a pleasure to remember what it felt like to imagine spring while enjoying the real thing.

Beginning artists are invited to learn the basics of encaustic painting with me at my Boulder, Colorado studio in March.

Encaustic for Beginners
Date: Saturday, March 20th, 2010
Time: 1:00 to 4:00pm
Place: TBD
Cost: $125, includes materials
Details: Here

Why do you paint?
For exactly the same reason I breathe.
That’s not an answer.
There isn’t any answer.
How long hasn’t there been any answer?
As long as I can remember.
And how long have you written?
As long as I can remember.
I mean poetry.
So do I.

- e. e. cummings

Does anyone know the history of this poem? I’d like to know who the painter is.

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.

I’m reading the Wayne Thiebaud video transcript (from the “70 Years of Painting” show), searching for juicy bits to share with you. They are not hard to find. Here’s what he has to say about advice he received from Robert Mallary that helped him “shape-up” as a painter.

“Work harder; develop a critical sense; understand what you are doing and know how to design problems which would get you to someplace where you thought you wanted to be… He would spend hours on what it was to interrogate a work of art: How to understand in in terms of its formal relationship… Make it darker, how to transfer it from, say, one kind of value structure to a higher structure, what would that do to it? What to do if you were to take all your color out of it and do it in black and white. Those options, which represent for a painter, I think, the tools of use and how to prepare for yourself always to be specific in order to take risks, to not be afraid of failure, make lots of work which is worth only throwing out. That was a very big and helpful exercise…

The “nerve of failure” is a very important aspect of painting and while it makes you uncomfortable and vulnerable, if you don’t elevate your desires and ambitions to some kind of level of reality in terms of the long tradition that you are a part of, however small, then you have the risk of ignobling that great tradition which we use and which we respect and which we are hopefully a part of.

- Wayne Thiebaud interviewed by Rose Fredrick, 3/16/09