Brand New Painting

I seemed to need to do a landscape; this one's called "Field of Artists Dreams" and combines fresh encaustic with pretty little patches of paint - little mini-paintings.



"Field of Artists Dreams"
Encaustic with mini-encaustic paintings on wood
12" x 12"

Reworked Old Into Totally New Painting

This started out as my first Cel Animata painting, then became the "Nothing But Flowers" painting (see last version below); I scraped the whole thing down today and started over; after months and months of work and 1/8" worth of wax later, I finally like it!

"All the Way from Africa"
Encaustic on Paper on Board

12" x 12"

Today's New Painting

This is the first encaustic I've painted directly onto the plywood panel, with no intermediary watercolor paper. There is so much visual depth to this that cannot be seen on a computer monitor!

"Behind the Wall"
Encaustic and Beeswax on Plywood Panel
12" x 12"

New Painting

Brand new abstraction. This feels like a new direction for me. I gotta say, I like it!


"Number One Campfire"
Encaustic and beeswax on paper on board
12" x 12"

The Importance of Appropriate Venue

There was a recent blog by artist Robert Genn about an experiment by the famous violinist Julian Bell -- who usually plays with great symphony orchestras in fabulous concert halls. One day, he went down to the Washington metro station, opened up his violin case, and played for free (and the occasional tip thrown into the case of his million-dollar Stradivarius).

Hardly anyone paid him any attention; he received $34 in tips for 43 minutes worth of playing -- or about $40/hr. -- much less than the nearly $1000/minute he usually makes playing in fancy concert venues. Very few people stopped even for a few moments to listen; one person recognized him.

What does that say about where one displays one's talents? Without all the trappings of legitimacy conferred on artists, how many people will pass your work by?

For more of this story, some discussion by artists, and a link to a very compressed version of the video of Bell's experiment, click on the title link.

First Atomic Bomb Tested on This Day in 1945

I suppose that sounds more like a political statement than one on art, but as I'm working on a large series of paintings of nuclear bombs, it really is a statement about my art.

I envision painting about 100 paintings of nuclear bombs, which would be just a drop in the bucket compared to how many nuclear bombs exist on our planet today.

OK, so it's a little political, too, but that's not what I'm here to talk about.

There is both a power and a beauty in the fractal qualities of the cloud-like forms of nuclear bombs -- and hurricanes and tornadoes -- that fascinates me. They make a great subject for painting my small encaustic paintings that aim to straddle the space between abstraction and representation. My goal is to paint really beautiful paintings, even if they are of troubling subjects - maybe especially if they are of troubling subjects -- in the hope that the viewer can see past the scariness of the bombs, tornadoes and hurricanes, and see the beauty of the paint.

For me, these paintings are paint first, and images second. Take a look at my small beginning paintings, and stay tuned for more to come.

Roky Erickson Performance & Movie

We went to see Roky Erikson Friday night at the Paramount. What an amazing show! The evening started with a showing of the documentary film on his life, You're Gonna Miss Me. It was very heart-wrenching. It's makes one wonder how many creative people survive the damage inflicted on them by truly dysfunctional parents (and how many don't); how many would become creative without being raised in that kind of insanity, and how many wouldn't... I think both Roky and his younger brother, Sumner, are incredibly brave for displaying the honest tragedy of their upbringing, and the subsequent events, both good and bad.

After the movie, Roky and his current band played an amazingly great set. It was his birthday performance, and he was totally present -- playing and singing fabulously. Songs like, "Starry Eyes," "Two-Headed Dog," and of course, "You're Gonna Miss Me." What a treat!

[Roky was a founding member of the 13th Floor Elevators and pioneer of the psychedelic rock genre.^[1] ]

My First Hurricane Painting

Katrina, of course.

This was much more difficult than the tornado paintings, for some reason. Seems like it needs to be far bigger, also (it's only 10"x8" and will be mounted on a larger sheet of baltic birch plywood and framed, just like the tornado paintings).

But not bad for a start. I may work on it some more; I don't know...

Mega Tornado!

I actually started this one prior to the one in the previous post (below). This was the first of the tornado paintings painted into a rough and very absorbent watercolor paper mounted on Masonite.

This is also one of those paintings that was rockin' in a way after my initial painting session, but one tiny area wasn't quite right, and in changing that area, I ended up changing and repainting pretty much the entire painting several times before arriving at this. In the initial painting, the wax had soaked deeply into the watercolor paper in a fascinating, beautiful and unexpected way, and so looked far more like a slightly shiny watercolor painting than like my other encaustics.

So I discovered yet another way to work with encaustics. Love it and hope to retain that sense of watercolor-y patchiness in a future painting (that effect did not quite survive the several repaintings).

Tornado Over a Lake

You can see I've gotten comfortable with the encaustic process again, as this little painting (which I love), has gotten more away from abstraction than the three previous ones (below).

This one was painted into rough watercolor paper mounted on masonite. This paper really soaks up a lot of the wax paint, so many more layers were required to achieve the effect I was looking for.

A White Tornado

Here's another -- a really huge tornado. I love how the diagonal lines worked out in this piece. It is again, one of those paintings that's truly paint first and an image second.

I imagine painting this again in oil, about four times as large, and really abstracting it away from the 'image' of a tornado -- just abstract shapes of color and texture.

I hope you get a chance to see this painting up close and personal -- it is full of beautiful little passages of paint. Come to my studio for the East Austin Studio Tour this coming November or call me to make arrangements to see this in person. Check my website for contact info.

A Tornado Seen from Below

I'm not sure where I found this image, and I really can't imagine anyone being brave or crazy enough to stand under a tornado and take a photograph.

But it's a fascinating image, and here's my take on it. I love how this painting, like the immediately previous one, also straddles that space between abstraction and representation.

More Encaustic Tornado Paintings

It felt so good to see my little tornado paintings in the AVAA show, and I've always intended to keep painting them until...whenever. So, here's my first tornado painting in a while; I had started it months ago, but it was too 'happy,' so today I took it in a dramatically different direction.

Unlike the abstract encaustic paintings, these semi-representational paintings really require a delicate balance. Because it had been a while since I painted like this in encaustic, my tendancy was to let it achieve painting-hood as soon as possible, with as little reworking for the sake of 'perfecting' the image as possible. So, for me, the great joy in these first few paintings, when I'm a bit rusty and unsure of my process, is how they sort of straddle the line between abstraction and representation.

After all, they are paint first, and images of tornadoes second.

For a bit of background on the encaustic process, read this previous post (below).

The Encaustic Process

The process of painting in encaustic entails heating up the paint - which is a combination of refined beeswax, resin and pigment - until the paint mixture melts, then quickly brushing the strokes of paint onto a surface before the wax hardens -- which takes no time at all.* Usually, I can get only 1-3 strokes onto my surface before the wax solidifies. So, it's dip and stroke, dip and stroke, over and over and over until you've covered a portion of the surface, at least.

*[Another method for painting in encaustic is to keep your painting surface heated by placing it on a warming plate, so that the wax in the paint stays somewhat melted while you're painting. This feels much more like painting in oil, and I do it this way often, too.]

The layers also have to be fused together with heat to make the painting strong. There are several tools and methods for doing this; at present, I am fusing the wax with a heat gun -- in many cases, melting the wax layers together. The heat gun also blows out air, and thus moves the paint around a little or a lot, depending on my application of heat and air and my intentions.

This is what causes the tricky part of encaustic painting. You have to heat it at least enough to fuse the paint, and I find that I can manipulate the paint being blown around a bit and achieve some gorgeous effects. However, the danger is that the paint will blow around in unexpected and perhaps unwanted ways, so it's as likely that you'll ruin something you really liked as that you'll create some other area that's just what you wanted. Maybe it's actually more likely that you'll ruin some beautiful passage of paint. At any rate, the results are impossible to completely control.

Which is, in a way, why I love this medium so much. I have to be very Zen about my encaustic paintings, and the biggest skill to learn is when to stop messing with the painting.

Another Reworked Encaustic

Here's another encaustic painting that started out to be something quite different, but I followed the paint over time and ended up here.

Encaustic on watercolor paper mounted on wood, 12"x12" x2".

Reworking Some Encaustics

This started out as my first Cel Animata painting, but I lost contact with the original idea somewhere down the line. Then it turned into a painting of unintentional 'flowers,' but I still wasn't happy with it -- since they were unintentional 'finds' within the painting, the composition was a bit out of my control and always bothered me.

Now it's turned into something kind of crazy, and I'm not sure I'll let it live at this point, but for now, here it is; it's got some beautiful and interesting passages.

Incised encaustic on watercolor paper mounted on wood, 12"x12" x2" deep.