This painting is from a 2013 series entitled Beneath the Surface. As popular a child I spent hours looking over my grandmother's scrapbooks and diaries. I loved sifting through the memories of the past. Now I am middle aged and I have in my basement the scrapbooks, diaries and photographs of four generations of family and of my own younger years, piles of words and faces. I am the memory keeper. These letters and photographs of family both instruct me and weigh me down. I draw solace and inspiration from their words, but I also judge myself by their standards and come up wanting. The layering and uncovering that happens in encaustic mirrors my own internal unmasking process.
Encaustic is pigment mixed with beeswax and resin (tree sap), heated and applied as paint. Egyptians during the period of the Roman Empire in the 1st century BCE used the process to paint tomb portraits. I started out as a photographer and fell in love with the process of painting with wax: the tactile and subtractive quality of the medium, the layering and mark-making that it enables, the way it opened up painting to me. I start with a wood panel and add a base of photographic imagery, either my own work, copies of family photographs and letters, or historical imagery. I layer the encaustic paint, I gouge and scrape, I incorporate additional imagery, writing and mark-making.
Each piece is original and wired and ready to hang. Your piece can be immediately exhibited. Please do not place it in direct sunlight or right above a fireplace, or in extremes of heat or cold (below 32 degree F).
Product code: You popular Remember the Cinder