I’m happy to share that Linea South End luxury apartments has acquired four of my paintings (below) for their thoughtfully curated project in Charlotte, NC. Thanks to their team and to Sugarlift for the collaboration.
I’m happy to announce that the North Carolina Museum of Art, Winston-Salem (formerly known as SECCA) acquired my painting New River Gorge for their Portable Gallery outreach program.
Through the portable gallery program, individual artworks are mounted in road cases (the same ones musicians use to carry gear) and brought to classrooms across the region as part of a teaching library. Students have access to real artwork made by living artists.
I’m honored my work was chosen for this program, and love the idea that one of my paintings gets to travel and be experienced by kids who may not often go to museums.
I’d also like to take this opportunity to say that art education matters!
Last summer in June 2023, one of my paintings, Field and Forest with Pink, was carefully packed up by an art shipper and left my studio to travel to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, for the US Department of State’s Art in Embassies program. At the time, I wrote about it here.
Recently I received a surprise package from the Department of State containing some catalogs featuring my work along with the other paintings in the Bishkek exhibit. Happily, they also sent me a link to share so that you can view it online. You can peruse the exhibition catalog here.
I love that this Art in Embassies program exists, and I can’t believe that my artwork is being used as a kind of soft power for diplomacy.
Join me this Thursday at The Art Gallery at Congdon Yards for a one-hour discussion. We’ll be talking about inspiration, techniques, and processes for my exhibit, “A Place of Leaves and Earth,” currently on display at the gallery. The program is free and open to the public, and there will be coffee and doughnuts! Registration is required.
The gallery is located at 400 W English Dr, Suite 151, High Point, NC 27262.
I recently made a series of 6 sculptures using encaustic. Encaustic paint is made by melting wax and damar crystals, and mixing them with pigments for color. Each painted layer then has to be fused to the layers underneath it by liquifying the surface with a propane torch.
The materials I used are: encaustic (wax, pigment, damar resin), cardboard, galvanized steel, and polyvinyl acetate (a fancy way of saying Elmer’s Glue or white glue).
I documented the process from ideation to completion, and you can scroll down to see it from start to finish.
The sculptures are on view and available from the Art Gallery at Congdon Yards in High Point, NC till April 19th.
My sketchbook a couple months ago: the sculpture shape ideas (right) and color combination ideas for sculptures (all over the place). There’s also a drawing for a painting (top left), planning for this exhibit (bottom left), and random ink marks
Drawing a shape on cardboard
Cutting out shapes using an X-acto blade
Cutting and shaping steel wire for the legs and base. The base pieces are also shown
Testing the steel legs and base for balance
Clamping and drying the sculptures. Here the body shape has been attached to steel legs, which has been sandwiched between 2 base plates.
Some of the sculptures after I filled in all the edges with Golden Light Modeling Paste. This way I have a nice smooth, not rough cardboard-y, edge. I sanded and shaped all the edges.
Priming the pieces using R&F Encaustic Gesso for a nice smooth absorbent surface. I sanded the surfaces before and after.
Four of the sculptures primed and ready to go
My encaustic hotplates with melted unmixed colors in the big pots and mixed colors in the lids. The big containers contain clear medium and white.
Six finished encaustic sculptures
In this video you can watch how I fuse the encaustic layer using a propane torch.
My exhibition “A Place of Leaves and Earth” is up at the Art Gallery at Congdon Yards in High Point, NC January 25 – April 19, 2024. Here’s a walk-through of the exhibit that features paintings, sculpture, video, sound, and installation. The work is available for purchase from the gallery.
About the work:
Making my work and moving my body outside have always been the ways that I process things. The work in this exhibit is deeply personal, generated by time I spend in nature alone and with family and friends. It is also born from the range of emotions I feel as I read the news and I make my way through the world as a human. My grief and anger and fear over our changing environment and socio-political upheaval are filtered through the quiet meditative space I find when I’m moving through nature and is sublimated into the artwork.
This grouping is comprised of paintings, video, sound, sculpture, and installation made in the last 5 years, a time that coincided with my son’s time in elementary school. Now that he is older and more independent, I have more uninterrupted time in the studio. I have space to meander, and to sit back and observe and to play. This body of work is a culmination of ideas that have percolated over the last two decades, and of giving myself the grace to learn new techniques and ways to engage the senses.
I hope you’ll experience this work through a poetic lens and allow yourself to be flooded with the sensations and memories this work evokes.
“Before we can save this world we are losing, we must first learn how to savor what remains. This is more than an ecological crisis or a political crisis — it is a spiritual one.” — Terry Tempest Williams
Photographer and all-around awesome human Daniel White interviewed me a few months ago for The Free Pizza Podcast, and our conversation is now live on Episode 188. We talk about early influences, studying in Europe, living in Australia, my approach to painting, teaching at UNCSA and more… You can listen to it wherever you like to tune in.
We finally got around to shooting my new work this weekend… which means these paintings will be available for purchase. Subscribers will get first dibs this week before the work goes live here on my shop, so if you don’t already get my emails, follow this LINK to sign up.
There is something odd or awkward about the images, and at the same time a sense of joy. By playing with shapes, color and composition, I’m searching for a way to elevate the ordinary.
Thank you to arts writer Linda Jerkins for featuring my work in this month’s issue of New South Finds, an online magazine that profiles Southern artists and their work.
You can read the profile and see the other artists in this month’s issue here.
I’ve been working on a new group of paintings. The work feels good, which is actually scary because this makes it harder to progress in the paintings. It’s easier to work on a painting when it doesn’t feel right and when things obviously need to be corrected.
Part of the process for me is figuring out the painting as I go. I don’t have a particular image in mind when I’m working, so the process is a kind of searching for the image. As the painting progresses, I slowly discover the painting – a kind of adventure!
To summarize my painting process:
Over the years, I’ve tried to combine some of the different ideas I explore in my work: geometric abstraction such as my little watercolor squares, plants and the landscape, and a stacking of shapes like these paintings:
In the new group of paintings I feel like I’m getting some traction combining these ideas. The work feels decisive and allows me to work both from life and with abstraction – which is satisfying. I start the paintings looking at a landscape or still life (a house plant in this case) as a reference. I block out a composition in one color – usually a hot pink because I enjoy the dissonance it creates with the colors in the finished painting. Using that first start as a sort of map, I decide what to outline or fill in with color. From there, each layer changes according to what the painting needs and I follow the process I outlined above.
I’m excited to be making these and am curious to see where the work goes as I progress in the series…