I don't know if this is finished or not. It's a new size i started working with this winter, small, just 14 inches square. I decided to post it and see what people thought (including myself). In the beginning of my work with encaustic, i was a little insulted when someone said, "well, it smells like honey, so it must be about bees". Um, i don't think Jasper Johns was talking about bees, so why does it have to be about bees? Since then i have come to understand a little better the medium that i'm working with, and have realized that, on some level, it actually IS about bees. I recently encountered a beeswax shortage which led me to research Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) and the disppearance of thousands of honeybees in North America in the past few years. If the bees aren't working, i'm not working. It affects me. And i am a drop in the bucket compared to what this means in the grand scheme of things. I know this. So i decided to make a piece that was actually ABOUT bees. And yes, it smells like bees, so it MUST be about bees.
This piece is finished but untitled, another piece about the strangeness of the Faro mine area in the Yukon. This was my first attempt to integrate found objects into a colour encaustic piece, and i'm still unsure of how successful this was.
Resilience , the finished piece that was shown in progress in a previous entry. I worked on this through the end of the summer into the fall, and it was sold in Toronto in October. Encaustic with guitar strings, found objects and soil on panel.
SO I think the reason they related the first piece to bees is because the colour looks like honey and then the lug nuts are reminiscent of the shape of a honeycomb.
ReplyDeleteI might have drawn the same conclusion, but not based on the fact that you used wax. (DUH!) THat's my fav, BTW. It has fabulous texture and I love the composition.
I love the use of the guitar string. That looks so cool!
Actually, L, that piece you are talking about was intentionally about bees, and you are bang-on with your description of the honeycomb effect! I am glad someone read it this way because that was my intent The original piece was a colourful piece on a single layer of cheesecloth, i haven't posted it because i wasn't too proud of it.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the compliments. I'm really loving this new direction. :)