I’m going to be cantankerous and withhold The Daily Bird today so that I can write about painting instead. And don’t think I don’t have the Daily Bird done. Here’s a thumbnail, with a larger image coming tomorrow.
I’m spending all my time right now doing encaustic because I have an ever-nearing deadline for these 50 pieces, but I’m thinking about painting.
The in-progress paintings destined for my show in November are propped against the wall in my studio. Not in the drying racks, but against the wall where I will see them every time I walk in. They are begging for attention.
Painting is a jealous mistress. I can spend my time doing other things, as long as it’s somehow about painting. You painters in the audience will know what I’m talking about. Painting can be all-encompassing. Everything I do in my art practice has some bearing on my painting.
And perhaps that’s why I don’t paint all the time. It can be claustrophobic and can easily become too self-referential, so I find myself needing to step away for a bit.
These 50-pieces-in-50-days encaustic pieces are, by their very nature, sketch-like. I quickly found that I can’t do one piece a day using my usual encaustic methodology. So these pieces became about other things. Composition and color. Line and gesture. Capturing some essence of ‘birdness’. Representing the ambiguous nature of a single moment in time.
In many ways, they become more like my paintings.
On the left is a Daily Bird, 6″x6″ encaustic. On the right After the Fall, oil on canvas, 60″x36″. The color palettes, medium, and subject matter are different, but they both share a similar use of space, with the bird or the figure trapped within the geometry imposed on the picture plane. Both have a sort of containment of the subject matter.
On the left, another Daily Bird, 6″x6″ encaustic. On the right, Repose II, oil on canvas, 28″x26″. In both of these, I was looking at a sort of off-kilter balance to the piece, and the use of gestural line in the two pieces is similar.
Saved for another day is a discussion of why my color palette is different in encaustic versus oil painting, and why I do figurative oil paintings but rarely do figurative encaustic. Don’t hold your breath, though…I have 28 more birds to do first.
Barbara, Thank you so much for letting us into your head a tiny bit. It’s interesting to hear about an artist’s thought process. I imagine that it is sometimes difficult to put words to, so I appreciate the clear thought. And I am completely drawn into your bird series. I find them beautiful to look at. Restful and yet exciting.