I've got the city surrounded!

It seems I'm busy all of a sudden.

As I was about to depart for my recent vacation, I was contacted by the Semiahmoo Arts Council and invited to show a new piece in their "Best of 2011" show which is on now until November 17 at the White Rock Community Centre. 

Wave is an encaustic piece that was so new i didn't have time to photograph it before running it down to White Rock the morning after i arrived home from my holiday.  It can be seen sitting sideways on the floor in this post.


I will also have work in 2 more upcoming shows:


Seymour Art Gallery, Deep Cove, BC.  "Discovery 2012", January 2012.  I will post the details closer to the show dates.

Maple Ridge ACT Gallery, Maple Ridge, B.C. "Ensemble", November 19 to December 19, 2011.
This show includes "ensembles" of work from various artists in the Lower Mainland.  Works from two of my recent series will be on display.
The "Resilience" series explores the qualities of beeswax encaustic medium and the objects i fuse into the wax, and the relationships formed by the fusion of the materials.

 Collapse, 2011, Encaustic, found objects, dirt, 14 x 14 inches

 Dis/Continuity, 2011, Encaustic, guitar strings, dirt, 14 x 14 inches

  Root, 2011, Encaustic, guitar strings, dirt, 14 x 14 inches

The "Faro" series explores, through a series of small paintings (over 30 were done in total), the destruction and transformation of a large expanse of land in the Yukon that served as the site of several different types of mine from 1969 to the late 1990s.  The series reflects the destruction of the natural area through unnatural colour, using the translucency and fragility of the encaustic wax medium to portray the strangeness of this area.

Clockwise from top left: Dehisce, Elemental, Perception, Fragment.  

All Encaustic, 2010, 3 x 4 inches.

  

 

 

New (ish) works from the tiny studio (apartment)

Thought you might want to see what i've been working on through the fall and winter.

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.