I have always been interested in history. I love old buildings with peeling walls that show their many incarnations, and objects whose patina comes from decades and decades of existence. I love to hear old-timers’ stories and imagine the worlds they’ve lived in. Encaustic painting is itself a very old technique that dates from ancient Greece. Working with layers of translucent beeswax and pigment allows me to create a surface history of my thought processes and actions. I usually begin painting with images or objects of personal significance. Sometimes a thick layer of pure wax simply embeds the image as if the event were frozen in time. Sometimes an object lies beneath the wax, seemingly awaiting excavation; once gone, the wax retains the object’s phantom as proof of its one-time presence. Alternating layers of wax and pigment are often built up to create a viscous-like surface depth where the original images remain buried like memories we would rather forget. Sometimes the layers are melted back to reveal bits of the previous imagery, much like the fragments of past experiences we combine and re-configure in memory. Often this chance process suggests an entirely new direction for the work, much like the unforeseen events that can alter the course of our lives. This random versus conscious nature of our existence is further explored in the pairing of seemingly unrelated images. Whether the end result of such process is suggestive of a vast landscape or a microscopic portion of our physical world, or simply an emotional time or place, my mission is to explore the ephemeral nature of existence with pigment and wax and memory.

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