So this is what I got from my journey to the Land of encaustic. I like the immediacy of the first few days, I felt like I was back in the 80's doing a cool expressionistic painting. Then I read this horrifying article about Courtney Love hanging out with Anselm Keefer!!! What? yuck! Oh yeah it isn't the 80's anymore! Does anyone do expressionistic work in 2010? Not that I care what others do. It just tainted everything! How could one of my your heros hang out with Courtney Love? OK I'll take a shower and wash the yucky off!
I declared I was returning to humanism a while back, and part of that is including feelings and expressions in the work. What makes us human. How to connect to that in 2010. So this side trip into expressionism is necessary in order to establish some perimeters.
Back to my Monkeys. Each of the panels has shards of the bowl I used in the Monkey bowl in the pervious post. Each has a 3-D moon with a face on it. The monkeys each have a bowl or cup of tea. one decides to greedily sit on it angering the snake and endangering the moon, spazing out at the situation he created. The other shares the bowl with the snake and lives in harmony with the moon safe and stable. At least that is what I see.
It took me about a month to finnish these panels. I took a lot of miss steps but in the process I learned a lot about what aspects of this medium I like. There is a lot of temptation to go decorative with wax and I rejected those up front, for better or worse. Each night after hours of applying wax, fusing it then scraping it back, flashes of the best effects hunted my dreams. The next morning I worked to find these special moments and recapture them. It was a first try at a new medium, 2-D. But it is also related to all the other mediums I have ever worked with. Like oil painting and sculpture combined with heat. Each medium has it's pluses and minuses. But it is empowering to have knowledge of many. More place for me to explore..
I am ready for the next big thing....because it is time to start a new project.....
Onward!......wait check out the mean Monkeys it will warm us up for the next project! Ok, proceed, ONWARD!!
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