Abstract Paintings and Musings on Art
I have completed two new tornado paintings; one was the one I started a few weeks ago while being interviewed for a Weather Channel segment about my tornado paintings. It’s changed a lot since it was filmed in progress (final version above; first version below).
This one is very highly textured and looks really amazing in person.
As promised, here are 6 of my new encaustic paintings — 5 of these were begun at last weekend’s encaustic workshop at Majestic Ranch. I completed them and created one new painting (so far) after returning home.
You can see I’ve gotten comfortable with the encaustic process again, as this little painting (which I love), has gotten more away from abstraction than the three previous ones (below).
This one was painted into rough watercolor paper mounted on masonite. This paper really soaks up a lot of the wax paint, so many more layers were required to achieve the effect I was looking for.
It felt so good to see my little tornado paintings in the AVAA show, and I’ve always intended to keep painting them until…whenever. So, here’s my first tornado painting in a while; I had started it months ago, but it was too ‘happy,’ so today I took it in a dramatically different direction.
Unlike the abstract encaustic paintings, these semi-representational paintings really require a delicate balance. Because it had been a while since I painted like this in encaustic, my tendency was to let it achieve painting-hood as soon as possible, with as little reworking for the sake of ‘perfecting’ the image as possible. So, for me, the great joy in these first few paintings, when I’m a bit rusty and unsure of my process, is how they sort of straddle the line between abstraction and representation.
After all, they are paint first, and images of tornadoes second.
For a bit of background on the encaustic process, read this previous post on how to paint in encaustic.