Artwork Entered in ECAC Annual Show

On Feb. 1, I entered six pieces of fine art in the Elko County Art Club’s Annual Show at the Northeastern Nevada Museum in Elko, Nevada. The show will hang there for three months, starting in early February. An artists’ reception at the museum is planned for sometime in March, details to follow.

Five of the six pieces I entered are encaustic paintings in various sizes, including a mobile titled “Encaustic Experiments” that contains about two dozen of my small encaustic works made while I was learning to use my encaustic iron, hot plate,  and hot stylus tools.

The sixth piece, Rainbow Steed, is truly unique, in that each of the colored sections of the horse has been painstakingly cut out of mat board. Then each piece has been coated with many alternating layers of melted Ultra Thick Embossing Enamel (UTEE), glittery gold embossing powder, and opalized iridescent inclusions embedded in rainbow colored UTEE. The surface is shiny and somewhat bumpy. Then all the pieces have been glued, like a jigsaw puzzle, onto the outside of the frame’s glass.

The longer pieces of the puzzle wanted to curl upward when the UTEE was cooling, so I had to put heavy weights on them during the gluing process. When the glue was semi-dry, the excess glue that had oozed outside the pieces had to be carefully cleaned off. Then the weights went back on until the glue cured enough to hold the pieces flat.

Blue Steed is a stenciled encaustic print.

Behind the glass, I placed black mat board with the center rectangle as a separate piece offset from the outer mat by 1/4″ with white paper showing behind the mat board in the rectangular 1/4″ box. The piece is 16″ x 20″, and the satin black wood frame adds about another inch on each side to those dimensions. The horse itself is 9″ x 16″. Rainbow Steed is priced at $325.00, and will be available on my website three months from now, if it does not sell at the show. If you are interested in purchasing it while it is still hanging at the museum, contact me, as this may be easily arranged.

Blue Steed was made using the stencil that remained after cutting out the pieces for the Rainbow Steed. I placed the stencil over an encaustic landscape painting of mine, turned sideways, and photographed the result. I then did some digital clean-up of the area behind the horse and printed the result on glossy photo paper, sealing it for additional UV protection.

I envision additional prints using this same stencil and/or any additional similar stencils I may make in the future. The resultant photos may be resized, flipped horizontally, and/or grouped with other such photos to make many more works in this style. This may lead to a large body of new works!

I plan to make prints and note cards of both the Rainbow Steed and the Blue Steed available soon on my website, so watch for them.

What do you think of these pieces? Should I make more like these?