Original artwork description:

This is a small encaustic painting: painted in highly-pigmented pharmaceutical-grade beeswax that's combined with damar resin. The resin makes the surface impermeable and hard once cooled. That's the other thing about encaustic: one paints hot (175 degrees F). Painting this way allows me to build up layers of colors and to manipulate the surface in such a way that intricate lines and swirls and other eddies of color become possible, in effect, not just mimicking the natural processes, but actually using the same forces (liquid to solid state, thermal and air currents, etc.) nature uses. The images look, I think, like the formations on finds on earth, in rocks, in the sky, in the ocean . . . plus the finished work has the natural luminosity and sheen of beeswax. I've embossed the surface here, actually using a lace doily that I filled with encaustic wax, then pulled up and placed again, adding additional color. Other markings are made with silicon stencils, so the surface is highly textured, and some of the uppermost edges of shapes are tipped with a pearlized blue-gold powdered pigment "dust" -- just to add a touch of added sheen.

Materials used:

encaustic paint, powdered pigment, on hardboard

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