The greatest pleasure for me is when I approach a blank panel and begin to lay down virgin color. All the possibilities seem endless and this is exciting to me. Working with hot wax, I have to choose my colors before I start, but I do not have a formal sequence in mind. Wax lures you when it goes down wet and glistening only to harden in seconds. It is formidable. A long brush stroke may not make it to where you want it because it cools solid often in the middle of the stroke. Yet the instant drying time allows the work to remain crisp and keeps the integrity of the color. You can create paintings of the moment. In my Landform series, I applied the color as striping bands of various thicknesses that become terrains, fields, or stratum. One might want to read a landscape into these paintings, but I offer nothing in the way of sky, ground, or other orienting clues. The luminous effects created with encaustic introduce light to the landscape. Defying cohesion or visual stability, the paintings in this series consist of dense, textured layers of translucent and opaque color that are scraped back. What develops in my process are boundaries where colors meet — where each color reacts to each other with its own edges butting up against another edge. There’s something about wax that wants to be touched, and I draw upon its tactile properties and find satisfaction in points of contact between edges and layers that form within the painting.
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