UnSung Studio

PRIVATE COLLECTION
encaustic, oil, found objects
12" x 30"
2015

The birth of ideas.

mixed media collage & oils on board
11" x 22"
SOLD

THIS IMAGE IS AVAILABLE IN PRINT VERSIONS HERE*
mixed media & collage with cold wax & oils on canvas
36” x 30”
SOLD

An image of the essential, beneath the mayhem and chaos of the surface. Thoughts fall away like ash, while blooms rooted in the molten heat of the core wynd and rise slowly toward a re-birth.

This process of working with texture was largely improvised; it keeps the words real.  If I have an agenda (ambitious hope or fear of failure, impatience or frustrated disinterest) the thing ends up contrived.    

When I tore this piece apart out of equal parts frustration and surrender, (the first time) what I had suspected was revealed as true. I had tried to ignore the probability that the wax substrate wouldn’t fuse properly with the gesso I chose.  Months later, days and days of work later, I realized that this decision had set the entire piece on a flimsy foundation. This was evident not only in the fact that it was not properly fused and peeled off the canvas once I went at it with my spatulas, but also in the look of it.  It looked uncommitted.

 When I tore the layers away the first time, I also stripped away the contrivance and discovered a very satisfying texture beneath: the parts that had integrity.  But with an impending exhibition, I became ambitious again and rather impatiently tried to resolve the thing anew to a pre-conceived and rather rigid vision. I re-painted and scraped back the piece completely about four times; I was fighting with the original composition, trying to negate it or deny it.  I didn’t want to work with it anymore, but it was there.  

Anyway, it was a rich experience.  I can see that now.  It stripped me down another layer. Maybe that’s the thing I got right from the start – the original title was accurate:  Soul Retrieval.  The process reflected a lot of self-questioning and excavation, asking myself what I wanted outside of all my own paranoia and ‘helpful’ suggestions from other people.  I examined identities I’d tried on and cast off again over the years like a life review, searching for the good fit, the perfect recipe, the missing pieces.    

A lot of identities were based on how to prove something to the world, to show how hard I was working, what a good artist I was. I stopped listening.  There were a lot of rich moments: minutes, hours even, when I was learning about the textures and colors and how they work together.  And then there was a lot, maybe too much frustration.  Fighting with myself, fighting with what was unfolding.  I was stripping away identities to find the essence of the work,  what arises naturally.  This doesn’t mean that an essence can’t be a so-called ‘negative’ emotion. The difference is whether or not I’m willing to relate with it, to “host” it, to allow it to be what it is within me.  I am learning to be curious about the presence of that difficult texture, rather than fight it.  

SOLD
oil, paper, encaustic, petals
and feathers on canvas
4” x 5"
2018

mixed media collage & encaustic with oils
on canvas
6” x 6”
2019
SOLD

mixed media collage with oils and encaustic
(paper collage from Rabelais’ “Gargantua and Pantagruel”)
24” x 36”
2015
SOLD

Rabelais was a French writer and priest whose bawdy and satirical novel about two giants was censored by the Sorbonne as obscene in a climate of increasing religious oppression. Rabelais invented hundreds of words in the text, some of which are not part of the French language. The novel pokes at the contradictions that make up various institutions, most specifically, the church. On my own quest for spiritual truth, I have found most institutions smeared with feces in one way or another. So the quest becomes one of patching together the sediment of wisdoms that sink beneath or rise above the dross.

PRINTS OF THIS PIECE ARE AVAILABLE HERE
NOTECARDS ARE AVAILABLE HERE
The Original Work has been SOLD.
oil, charcoal, text from Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, cold wax
46" x 34"
2016

mixed media & oils on canvas
5" x 7"
2018
SOLD

A door in the sky and the sand of this beach,
there are windows in everything
I sometimes don’t see.