I spent a day in the studio using the same palette over and over again painting stripes.  And more stripes.  I’m riffing on my previous blog post theme of Let’s Play Larger influenced by Hunt Slonem.

Color and repetition.

I pulled whatever panels had wax on them and continued one after the other.  Part assembly line part intuition, I just wanted to get the flow going after needing to stop painting so I could teach my encaustic workshops and prep for the upcoming Superfine Artfair in SF.  Now that those are somewhat under control I can dig in to my favorite colors of oud, fog and provincetown blue.

Like Hunt, these are warm-ups for something bigger down the road.  What’s nice about working on multiple paintings is that you’re free to paint the What If game.

What if I layer and scrape with these colors?

What if I try that on this one?

What if that interrupted line becomes a motif in all the work?

What if I change direction of stripes?

With some limitations (color and stripes) I was forced to dig deeper and deeper into what I could do with less.  This is when the fun begins and I was running out of panels.

Earlier in the day I had pulled out a painting that just wasn’t working for me anymore.  It’s partner piece sold last year and I wasn’t really exhibiting it anymore.

What if…?

And this is why I love encaustic.  With a few passes of the big torch the old painting was ready to be reworked.  In 5 minutes I had a bigger panel to work on and could keep the momentum.

Because of these:

This old painting…

…turned into this new painting.

You can see how the stripes and textured scraping came together in the larger piece with that interrupted line motif.  It’s like knowing where mother ship is and taking off for a solo flight.

Time to prep more panels and dig out even larger ones that have been hiding in storage.  Time to find mother ship again!

“What if…?”

XOXO,

Francesca