"Bittersweet Pilgrimage" Painting

I am encaustic artist living and working in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This stark and dramatic landscape feeds my desire to make work that tells my stories-tragic and sweet, beautiful and dark. Sometimes my muse may be as simple as the grays, blacks and whites of a sycamore tree’s bark or the high altitude desert plants on my daily hikes in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Other times, inspiration is fired by the painfully beautiful setting sun over the Ganges River on a sojourn there. I find emotional solace in poets from Neruda to Auden and their words find their way into my work as well. Because of its organic nature, wax can behave differently on any given day, due to pigments, humidity or the level of the heat source used for fusing. There is lots of scraping and smoothing and fussing with each layer of wax but eventually I begin to apply color and design. I often add my own handmade papers or snippets I’ve gathered on travels around the world. I start with deciding whether the work will be “warm or cool”-in other words, reds and oranges and yellows or blues and greens and violets. It varies with the seasons, I find. The wax tends to find its own way but eventually we meet in the middle and something connects with a line from a poem or from my own emotional well. I might see a shape that reminds me of something and I follow it. Mistakes happen but I often leave them because I am marked with my own mistakes and wounds and all of that has validity. Through my art I can trace my travels, my turning points and my moments of illumination.