Encaustic is an ancient form of painting with wax that the Egyptians used.  I completed a workshop and fell in love with the technique as it appealed to my way of working in the abstract.  Texture and color are important to my art and encaustic painting allows me to be creative.

I create my paintings either from one of my own photographs or from my imagination. I painted “Mosquito Creek” as a colorful abstract from a black-and-white photo I had taken of a mine entrance in Colorado. “C-Clamp” is based on a set of old tools my father had in his basement, and “Rusty” took form from a photo of a sculpture I had seen in the newspaper. I find an endless number of possibilities for paintings everywhere I look.

I began my “Face” series after seeing a piece by renowned French, Romanian-born sculptor, Constantin Brancusi, at MOMO (Museum of Modern Art) in New York City.  The reflections in the shiny surface of his  sculpture inspired me to paint a wide range of faces in bold colors.  To me, they capture the essence of humanity shared by cultures around the world.

This abstract figure series actually originated years ago when I lived in Canada.  I took a life drawing workshop, and the model did 15-second poses.   The challenge for the student was to produce paintings of each pose  with poster paint.   Not so long ago, while clearing out years of accumulated “stuff,” I came across the faded images from the workshop.  They inspired me to create these abstract paintings.  I allowed myself a log more time than 15 seconds to complete them!

Organic things appeal to me greatly.  While on a hike in Colorado, I found some shale and felt that I had to do something around these pieces of rock so I loaded up my backpack.  Shale is a fine grained sedimentary rock composed of a mud mix of flakes of clay minerals and silt-sized grains of other minerals.  It breaks off in fine, thin layers, as I have used in this series of paintings featuring shale pieces.