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Encaustic, collage and oil pastel on canvas
12" x 12"
It's been so long since I posted any new paintings! But I'm pleased with this one. It is highly textured with many layers of collage (mostly hidden now) and encaustic, followed by oil pastel.
Encaustic is a painting technique that combines color pigment with hot wax. The semi-liquid mixture of materials painted on to a wooden panel or other support and then fused to the surface with heat.
I use an old household iron to melt and fuse my pigment and wax. I also have a small "quilter's iron" for finer details. The red flowers were made by simply holding a red wax crayon against the iron and letting it drip onto the painting. The white details are oil pastel applied after the encaustic had cooled and hardened.
mixed media on canvas
6" x 8" x 1.5"
$50
I'm very pleased with this piece. Look closely behind the heart and you can see the eyes of a woman "watching her heart".
I started out with a deep stretched canvas, building up the green and blue surface with beeswax, crayon and flecks of gold leaf. Once that was dry, I made the cut-out in the centre so I could recess the 3-D heart. The final step was to affix the woman's face from the back. The woman's face is actually cut out from a famous poster by Rossetti. I had the poster in my living room for years - it was dry mounted on foamcore board, so it worked perfectly in this project (gave a nice clean finish for the back of the painting).
This painting is flexible in that it can stand up on its own (on a mantel or bookcase, for example) or be hung on the wall.
Grrrl PowerMixed media on canvas
24" x 16"
$450
This was the second painting I did using photos and transparencies.
Whereas in Being 13 I
used only dry media (paper, photos, transparencies, oil stick), in
Grrrl Power I branched out into using a combination of dry media
(paper, vintage wallpaper, photocopies, transparencies) and wet media
(acrylic paint).
Grrrl Power began with a photograph that I had
taken of my ten-year-old niece Leonie and her friend Annie.
In the photo, Leonie is impatient with posing and wanting to leave, while Annie is clowning around pulling her tiger t-shirt over her face.
I enlarged the photo to 11x17 and then used a photocopier to make lots of copies in various sizes. I used a stretched canvas as the support, and prepared it by "building" a surface of texture using old wallpaper and fabric. I then played around with various configurations of the photocopied images until something surfaced.
What I discovered is that the most evocative part of the image was Leonie’s posture* - her outstretched leg and beautifully curving outer arm. I decided to feature the shape of her arm by repeating it in diminishing sizes.While I was working on the painting, I was thinking about what it means to be a girl in our society. To represent my hope that Annie and Leonie’s apparent joy and confidence would continue, I added the angel holding a candle. After adhering all the collage elements, I painted around and over the collage elements with acrylic paints.
*After reading this analysis, Leonie said "Aunty, I disagree. The most evocative part of the image is the relationship between Annie and me." Smart kid.