"One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries." A.A.Milne
Gearing up (in more ways than one) for 5 days of wax next week at Warringah Printmakers Studio with Angela Noble. There will be two two day workshops, Encaustic Basics and Printmaking and Encaustic, and a ‘free’ day for participants to use our equipment and the studio space to develop their work. Should be hectic, exhausting and loads of fun!
Gotta love those colours!
This is printed on10 tiles, each 100 x100mm. the tiles can be arranged any way you want, as above, or like this.
The tiles are coated with encaustic medium.
Usually, prints are presented behind glass, with a matt surrounding the image and a frame enclosing the whole lot. Why struggle to achieve a beautiful surface, then put it behind glass, with its hardness and reflectivity?
I remember discovering encaustic at an exhibition in the Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney, some years ago. There was a beautiful Kim Westcott drypoint embedded in a glowing sensuous red wax. It was large, and unframed. I could see that potentially I could free myself from frame and glass if I explored encaustic. Encaustic is a medium entirely on its own , but it can also be used to collage prints or works on paper together, and to seal them from dust so that they don’t have to be presented behind glass. To work the wax, you can use techniques which are familiar to printmakers. Moreover, the wax can make even quite thick paper translucent, so there is an opportunity to explore the use of light. And, like in printmaking, there are lots of happy accidents. For the last few years, I have been learning as much as I can about encaustic, and have used it together with my printmaking, and alone, as a separate discipline.
I can see that I have plenty of new directions to take, places to stop on my journey, before I move on again.
Only one more part to this talk to come, folks!
This is the inspiration for the new work. It comprises three things that I love: rust, water, and Venice. The metal wall was hammered into the canal to hold the water back while a new brick wall was built behind it. That’s the way things are constructed in Venice, where the water can threaten building.
To make this work, first I laid down strips of paper I had ‘rusted’ some months ago, and coated them with a layer of medium. I used painters tape to mask off a straight line, and painted in some pale green. I added some green gold at the bottom of the board, and then ‘cool’ brushed some more on the top section. I used a tool to scribe into the wax, and added detail with a rust coloured pigment stick.
In the studio today I have been exploring encaustic. I have some German wooden cradled panels which are a beautiful start. The works I am making seem to me to be full of Venice, or perhaps my eyes are still full of Venice and I can’t see anything else. Not explicitly, of course, but there is something there…………I wonder whether you can see it, too.
They may not be finished yet, I need to look at them for a while to decide.
This one is quite small.
………this is larger
BOX OF BIRDS 