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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

Two Moons, 10″ x 8,” encaustic and ink on panel

Two Moons is one of ten new encaustic paintings on display this month at Wright Kingdom in Boulder, Colorado. I made the series using beeswax to create a skin-like sheen over rigorously cropped drawings of leaves, stems, pods, flowers and other pert, green things. The opening is tonight. You’re warmly invited to attend.

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

The other exhibiting artists are Annette Coleman, Theresa Haberkorn, Donna Mayo, and Joan Wolfer. All wonderful.

The Wayne Thiebaud exhibit at the Loveland Museum is gorgeous.

Wayne Thiebaud, “Bakery Case,” 1996

I went for the cakes (there’s something deliciously subversive about all that sugar) but ended up falling for his newer work – vertiginous, playful landscapes – a few of which are on view in this nice slideshow by the Sacramento Bee.

Of course, Thiebaud’s paintings are right and wonderful as they are, but I can’t help wondering how even MORE wonderful they’d be if they’d been rendered in wax. Thiebaud has a fantastic brushstroke that’s both indulgent and restrained. it’s hard to see in reproduction, but he makes these careful linear strokes and then mars them with goopy flourishes. It’s a sensual technique that seems ready-made for encaustic.

I’m a sucker for museum gift stores and picked up this sweet little book Counting with Wayne Thiebaud when I was there. Its cropped reproductions show Thiebaud’s brushstrokes fairly well.

It’s nice to know that, at 88, some people still paint like rock stars.

Old Fashioned Rocketry, encaustic and ink on panel, 5″ x 4″

Do you watch NASA TV? My husband streams it in his office so I get to pick up bits and pieces whenever I stop by. The broadcasts are sweet and earnest, astronauts and crew doing important work with gratitude and a touch of old fashioned gallantry.

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

Superkitty is my alter ego. She’s like Hello Kitty but scruffier, older and over being cute.

Spring Blade, encaustic and ink on panel, 5″ x 4″

We’ve had an extraordinary spring and summer here in Boulder, Colorado. Lots and lots of rain! It’s mid-July and everything’s still green. The world is light, precise and easy. I don’t remember summer ever feeling this way.

It’s an honor and a pleasure to announce a suite of ten new encaustic paintings hanging in the lobby at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. The concurrent exhibit in the main part of the museum, Pure Pleasure, is excellent, by the way. Definitely worth checking out. Admittance is free on Farmer’s Market days.

I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.

- John Adams, 1780

The first time I read the above quote it charmed me. We know our founding fathers and mothers to be starchy advocates of industry and piety, not the arts. So the reference to painting, poetry and music as something children ought to have a right to study… well, I love it. But having just watched the HBO mini-series John Adams I’m seeing the quote differently. Actor Paul Giamatti delivered the line with a contemptuous edge, sitting at table in France during the American Revolution surrounded by sensual excess. Though I prefer my earnest reading of Adams’ words, I appreciate the complexity lent by Giamiatti, who played Adams as a smart and principled but neurotic man who was hard on his children. A deeply humanizing portrait that I loved.

Happy Independence Day, 2009.

“John Adams 1823–24″ by Gilbert Stuart, oil on canvas 30″ x 25″

Oh, man. I inhaled The American Painter Emma Dial this weekend. It’s a fantastic novel about a NYC artist’s assistant who paints the paintings dictated by her famous boss. It’s the best, most real depiction of painting I’ve had the pleasure of reading or seeing on film and it’s deliciously quotable, too…

There is nothing sexier than a well-drawn line…

I was trying to build my world around being a painter. I worked tirelessly, fantasizing about the picture I was making. all the pictures to come, and what it would be like when they took on another life out in the world, apart from me. I never doubted that painting was my future…

When we got stir-crazy we went to the bar. Irene and I spoke contemptuously of some of the bar’s denizens who wore painter’s clothes and had not made a thing in years, or the ones who hid out in graduate school rather than face the difficulty of earning a living and figuring out hot to build a life as an artist. There used to be loads of people like us around, young and old, artists working without much thought for the business side or the academic side… But I did not know them anymore and I felt, thinking of Michael’s studio where I painted five days a week, that I was missing out…

Cannot think of a better summer read for an artist.

The Beginning Encaustic workshop at Creations Art Space has been rescheduled for Saturday, July 11th.

You can find out more and register here.

Curious about wax in Colorado? You’re invited to Beginning Encaustic at Creations Art Space in Boulder on Saturday. This class, at this location, is a lot of fun. Playful, exploratory and hands on. I love teaching it.

You can find out more and register here.

Color provokes a psychic vibration. Color hides a power still unknown but real, which acts on every part of the human body.

- Wassily Kandinsky