ARTIST STATEMENT

In my most recent series, Landscapes in Encaustic, I painted pictures of nature on manufactured wood supports.  For this show, I wanted to paint my pictures on wood supports that were of nature. I’d been collecting pieces of driftwood from the beach below Kincaid Park all summer. The wood came ‘ready-made’ in shapes that suggest the human figure: the same sort of androgynous figure that has often appeared in my paintings over the last ten years. As I explored various approaches to using encaustics to coax the nascent driftwood figures into existence, I simultaneously continued making other paintings on my usual flat, square supports.  And, as is often true in artwork, the two began to inform each other until I understood that the juxtaposition of the flat with the sculptural provided a level of interest neither forms achieved when viewed solo.