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Beginning artists are invited to learn the basics of encaustic painting with me at my 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

Here’s a nice article about roundness inspired by this Kandinsky painting.

Several Circles by Vasily Kandinsky, 1926

‘The circle, he (Kandinsky) wrote, is “the most modest form, but asserts itself unconditionally.” It is “simultaneously stable and unstable,” “loud and soft,” “a single tension that carries countless tensions within it.”

Kandinsky loved the circle so much that it finally supplanted in his visual imagination the primacy long claimed by an emblem of his Russian boyhood, the horse.’

- Natalie Angier for the NYTimes

Those of you charmed by bee imagery should check out Bees in Art, a virtual gallery of lovingly rendered images of honeybees, bumblebees and other Hymenoptera.

Worker Honey Bee, mezzotint engraving by Andrew Tyzack

Curator, artist and beekeeper, Andrew Tyzack, has assembled a collection of vintage books, paintings, drawings and prints that enhance his dramatic paintings of beekeepers at work.

Honey Farming, oil on linen by Andrew Tyzack.

The collection has a storybook quality that’s earnest and sweet and not at all didactic.

I love the softness of this bumblebee.

Bombus Terrestris, print by Richard Lewington

A new painting.

“Psychopomp, Gold and Blue Bird,” encaustic, ink and gold leaf on panel

psy•cho•pomp
noun
In Greek mythology a guide of souls to the place of the dead.
The spiritual guide of a living person’s soul.
In Jungian psychology the psychopomp is a mediator between conscious and unconscious realms personified in dreams as a wise man or woman or sometimes as a helpful animal.

Please join me for a lecture/slide-show about beeswax at BMoCA on Tuesday evening. I’ll be speaking about beeswax, how it is made by the bees, its uses in contemporary art and what it means. Free and open to the public.

Wax Fetish:
Beeswax, Materialism and Encaustic Paint
Tuesday, October 20th
7:00 – 9:00 PM
Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art
1750 13th Street
Boulder, Colorado

This looks like a terrific event despite the clunky description (and very nearly warrants a special trip to New York). Check out each panelist’s link to see something interesting.

Theory and Practice: Encaustic Painting Today
Artists Talk on Art
October 30th, 2009
7:00-9:00pm
The School of Visual Arts
209 East 23rd Street, New York, NY

Panel discussion with encaustic artists and people involved in the world of encaustic art who will explore the growing popularity of encaustic painting over the last 15-20 years and address the question of what in the climate of the arts and the times has revived the use of this ancient medium amongst contemporary artists when for so long it was used only occasionally, at best.

Moderator: Ellen Koment

Panelists: Richard Frumess, Nancy Azara, Michael David, Joan Giardano and Gail Gregg

Plantai #3, encaustic on panel, 15″ x 15″
By Ellen Koment

Prosperity, encaustic, ink and gold leaf on panel, 20″ x 16″

I know it’s recession time, but the weird, lush summer we had here in Colorado left me feeling like we passed through a dreamlike period of prosperity. The painting above, inspired by a first harvest of gooseberries (from a prickly, nearly forgotten shrub we planted three years ago) is on display at the main library in Boulder, Colorado as part of the 2009 Open Studios show.

My downtown Boulder painting studio will be open to the public from noon to 6 on Saturday and Sunday October 3rd, 4th, 10th and 11th. You’re warmly invited to stop by and say hello.

Open Studios 2009
October 3th, 4th, 10th and 11th
Noon to 6:00 pm
In the alley between Pine and Mapleton at 15th in Boulder, Colorado

“Space, and space again, is the infinite deity which surrounds us and in which we are ourselves contained.”

- Max Beckmann

The Drive Home, encaustic and ink on panel, 10′ x 8″

The painting above was inspired, in part, by salad burnet.

Burnet stem and leaves

Burnet is a cucumber scented salad herb. Like many herbs, it’s a vigorous grower but wilts quickly when picked. Its leaves are soft and flimsy and it has beautiful curving stems. Though I don’t often use serrated leaves in painting (too zig zaggy) I’m happy to make an exception for burnet leaves. They remind me of an animal’s hands, and when painted brown, they remind me of oak. Either way, they charm me. I hope you like them, too.

Strangely, the lines I get when I draw from the real offer more surprises than those that spring from my imagination alone. All my current work is inspired by plants. I don’t aim to copy them, but use them as a way to ground my hand.

Gravid, 10″ x 8,” encaustic, ink and gold leaf on panel

Grav•id
adjective technical
pregnant; carrying eggs or young.
• figurative full of meaning or a specified quality : the scene is gravid with unease.
ORIGIN late 16th Cent. from Latin
gravidus ‘laden, pregnant,’ from gravis ‘heavy.’

Art Opening and Hors D’oeuvres
Thursday, August 13th, 5:00 – 7:00 p.m.
Wright Kingdom Real Estate
4875 Pearl East Circle, Suite 100, Boulder
Hosted by Open Studios and Wright Kingdom