One painting, from start to finish, in 768 days…

This 24″x 24″ painting has undergone a surprising number of transformations before finally settling on the Broadstairs piece currently exhibiting at Northwest Encaustics. As one of the more epic #NoPanelLeftBehind pieces, I decided to trace Broadstairs back to its origins, and offer snapshots of its evolution over the past 2 years…

Most of my pieces begin with writing…whether it be part of a journal entry, passage from a book, lyric, poem. The base layers here also includes wood glue burn, yellow india ink, and several clear coats of encaustic medium.

School’s out, which means my studio assistant is on hand to scrape back the layers. Always happy to let the kid loose on my paintings. I consider this a good return on my investment.😉

My morning journal entry was all about how Everything is Connected. So I guess it should be no surprise that this would spill over into the studio…

Today is Scraping day. These wax scraps are SO beautiful!! They remind me of tulip petals. Trying to figure out how/where I can make use of these…

June 12, 2017

I found The Perfect home for those beautiful wax scrapings in another painting!!🤩 They work beautifully as beautiful blow-away tulip petals on this Self-Portrait piece I’m working on. It was just what this piece needed, an indication of how fleeting memories can be. I live for these Aha! moments…

This piece has been on a looooong Time Out. But Vacation means All Day Art Dates in PJs with the kid, listening to our favorite podcasts. I needed to seriously disrupt the surface of this piece, so I invited her to have at it! And I love having the kid’s hand in my artwork, at any stage.

And now, for something completely different! I drew my version of an elephant, then painted over the piece with oil and cold wax. Traces of the red with the yellow “sun” remain visible. This elephant hung in our living room for 6 months.

Re-purposing my elephant piece, which was in limbo and going nowhere. After numerous failed attempts at “making friends with gray”, I’m determined to keep painting and scraping and embedding and fussing til I feel good about this. Using oil paint and cold wax medium, I want this piece to evoke large craggy rocks.

I found Fall color inspiration on my morning walk — a blanket golden ginkgo leaves on the wet asphalt. This was just what I needed to get this piece over the hump. I see now where this piece wants to go. Feeling grateful for breakthrough moments of love and light…

This piece is back on the easel after a much needed break…”Out of Darkness, Light” (24″×24″). I like where this piece ended up, but it doesn’t feel done. So I’m putting it up in our house so I can live with it in our space. Often times, with this casual daily contact, I start to see what’s working, what’s not, and where the piece wants to go next…

Only one hour in the studio today before I head to work. I’ve been trying (unsuccessfully) to destroy this too-precious, overly-controlled piece. So today, with little time to think, I took my demo up a notch. I scraped down the entire piece, then covered it with stream-of-consciousness scribbles in French, using oil pastel and graphite, writing with my left hand.

I scraped the piece down, and layered 3 different whites over top, then used solvent to dissolve the surface. I look forward to seeing this with fresh eyes after my gallery shift today. Hopefully the original piece doesn’t surface again!!!

Came home and made one alteration…and now the piece has reached a resting point. “Reconciliation“: 24″×24” – oil& cold wax over encaustic on a cradled wood panel.

Taking a moment to bathe this piece in some much-needed warmth. The transformation continues…

The painting of 3 overlapping rings went thru several more iterations today before finally landing here.

Happy Monday!! Taxes are done, kid’s back in school. After taking a month off of painting to work on my sculptural piece (new for me/fun to do/not my forte)–I’m So Happy to return to painting. And nothing brings me more pleasure than radically making over pieces that weren’t quite doing it for me!! From white to black…

Calling this piece Done!! This piece has the distressed/topographic feel I’ve been aiming for. When I asked my friend Connie for title suggestions, she pulled up images on her phone of the white cliffs of Dover. And suddenly it hit me. The boarding school I went to, between the ages of 7-10, was in Broadstairs, Kent (20 miles north of Dover) where we had the same chalky cliffs.

And then I remembered…my school had a separate boarding house for the younger students. The older students boarded in the main school building across the street, which also contained the cafeteria, the gym, etc. So twice a day every day, for breakfast and dinner, we would head over to the main school via a secret, winding, underground chalk tunnel, lit sporadically with hanging lamps.

With this memory resurrected, I looked at this piece, the gold lit passage across the white distressed chalky surface, and I realized that the final version of this piece had finally arrived. I was done.

A short video reveals the peekaboo bling.☆