The Geometry of Dance Painting

BIO: Growing up in Short Hills, N.J., Caryl Gordon was only a short commute to New York City. At 16 years of age, she attended life drawing classes at the Art Student’s League in Manhattan on Saturday’s. After one year at Connecticut College, craving more of an art education , she was accepted at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, more commonly known as the Boston Museum School. Being drawn back to New York and its exciting culture, Gordon matriculated at the Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture receiving a full scholarship and a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in 1975. During and after having 4 children, Gordon had a freelance photography business sharpening her composition skills. At age 40, she relocated to Plano, Texas near Dallas where she was gifted a 2000 pound etching press. The next 15 years were spent in her garage making monoprints. Along the way, her prints were juried into shows across the United Stares in museums, galleries and universities. Printing led to a new medium, painting with encaustic. This new medium for Gordon( actually an ancient process going back thousands of years to the Greeks and Romans) became a passion. No longer printing in her garage, Gordon now has a large studio 10 minutes away from her home where she paints mixed media abstract encaustics. She is represented by the Sweet Art Gallery in Naples, Florida. Gordon has shown her work at art fairs in New York , Miami and San Francisco. ARTIST STATEMENT: My definition of life is having knowledge and experience, yet allowing the unpredictable to reveal itself. I follow this uncertain path when surprises arise in my paintings which often lead to new ideas and new approaches in what I create. Borrowing from the techniques and processes I discovered in my previous 15 year adventure in printmaking, I am now exploring the medium of mixed media encaustic. Working with many layers and using different viscosities of wax, are two of the ways making monoprints has influenced my painting, as well as trial and error, action and reaction. I work with combinations of geometric shapes and organic elements, which often result in aerial view abstract landscapes. When looking down from an airplane, I see man-made buildings, bridges, roads, etc. These translate into geometrics for me. Mother nature’s mountains, rivers, hills and valleys, I interpret as organics.