painting with fire: September 2015

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Upcoming solo show at the Village Theater at Cherry Hill

I'm having a solo show at the Village Theater in Canton Michigan in November. These works are a mix of aerial and ground based landscape abstractions, all in encaustic and ranging in size from about 11 x 30" to 24" x 48" in size.

I connect deeply with the outdoors. Places I’ve walked, hiked, sat, lived and imagined figure prominently in my work. As the only non-scientist in my family I have lived with scientific discussion of the world from a very early age and it profoundly affected the way in which I understand the world and how I make art. I've spent a lot of time looking at scientific visualization from the macro to the micro in scale and have been fascinated with aerial views of landscape for many years - often beginning work from satellite or astronaut photography.

I am drawn to painterly abstraction even when I am painting in a representational way. I enjoy the materiality of working in encaustic and want that lushness to come through whether I am painting from an aerial or a conventional perspective. The pieces in this show inhabit a space that hovers between representation and abstraction - they can be read somewhere in between and are as much about painting as they are about specific places although they almost all do refer to a specific location not a generic idea about place. That relationship with place is important to me and these pieces, even the aerial views, are all places I have been and have strong feelings about.

Below you see some of the work in the show. It's a big space - there are 34 pieces in the exhibition and I will post more of them as the time gets closer.

Overlaid Rivers