Friday, March 4, 2016

a new way to work (or knowing when to say when)...





A few days ago I went into the studio thinking I was going to create a series of pale neutral abstracts and this is what happened. I love the depth of the colors and the chalky matte finish of the rough pastels but once I finished them my brain turned on and said... "Ok, now time for the wax".   In my mind that made sense because I'm an encaustic painter, I love the lush look and feel that wax lends to a piece and wax makes everything better, right?  I created a small mock up piece to experiment with applying wax over the pastel and tried poring the wax and brushing it on and had pretty good results.  There was only minimal smearing and the wax created that ethereal milky look it gets when painted over black,  but I couldn't bring myself to apply it to these pieces.  In the end I decided that this series is going to be left naked and wax less, left with that deep-matte-dead-flat-chalky-pastel-goodness exposed.  


1 comment:

Bridgette Guerzon Mills said...

Love them, especially the far right.