RE-IMAGINED

Featured Artist Show

December 2023

CoArt Gallery, Staunton, VA

Click on images to enlarge

While I now work mostly with the encaustic medium, the foundation for all my work is always photography. I have been photographing all my life. Something I love about it is the ability to reinterpret an image and create something totally different from what was originally captured. For this exhibit, I did not create any new images. All of these images span several decades of image capture yet I’ve re-imagined each of them in ways that I did not imagine previously, using both image transfers and cyanotype processes with encaustic.

My photo encaustic paintings are made with beeswax, damar resin (a natural tree sap that acts as a hardening agent), photographs on various natural papers, and a variety of wax friendly paints and pigments. The paintings are created in many layers, fusing each layer with heat.

Image transfers are created by burnishing a print to the wax so that the ink adheres to the wax, and then wetting the paper and rubbing it away leaving only the ink. It is a delicate process that easily goes astray. The image transfer pieces are 10×10″. 

Cyanotypes are what are often called “sun prints”. A light sensitive chemical is brushed on to the paper and then exposed to the sun. Most often these are done as direct prints of natural items, flowers, grasses, etc. Instead, I have created negatives from my image files and used those to expose the prints. The cyanotype pieces are 8×8″.