Collaborative work with Alison Overton

I have really enjoyed painting on the lush photos of Alison Overton, fellow artist and dear friend.  Her imagery really sets my imagination ablaze and I feel lucky that she has given me carte blanche to paint whatever I want on them.  These are two that I have been painting on recently.  I'm getting close to finishing our first set of 10.  Excited! 

On a side note, my wax collection on the wall beside where I paint has grown and grown.  In the process of making paintings, I end up with pieces of wax that are mixed in color and can't be re used.  I end up absentmindedly forming little doodads and sticking them to the wall.  It makes a nice background for me and it's constantly growing and evolving.

Electric cat and friends

This cat waited a long time before it was used in any paintings.  I have a folder of collage miscellaneous 

 things, and the cat lived there a long time before joining up with this scraped encaustic background and becoming Electric Cat.

 The birds and butterfly face are mostly done but I have ideas for the owl below.

 Newest installment in my collaborative work with Alison Overton.

 And the twins are almost finished.  I'm in the details phase now, which I love.  I feel like these paintings are revitalizing my relationship with oil paints.  Since I started these, I have lots of ideas for new oil paintings.

Select details from the paintings-

Owl and Butterfly, more progress on the collaboration

I'm using a scraping technique to get the colorful surface effects in the owl painting and the butterfly painting.  I layer a bunch of encaustic colors and then scrape through the layers.  I'm turning the butterfly into a person/butterfly. 

                                      

The newest in my collaborative work with Alison Overton.  Her head is made of a squishy blackberry, and a bee has landed on it.  

 Ingrid is really into acrylic painting.  Here are 2 of her latest.  Pretty awesome for an almost 3 yr old.

 Also, I hadn't realized she had learned how to take photos until I downloaded this batch, here is one of her first photos!

(Fraternal) Twin paintings- a few more layers.

 I've added a few more glazes of color and detail.  Glazing is fun but takes forever, because in between each glaze the paint has to dry, and I'm using oils, which take a while to dry.  Which is a good thing.  As I am building up the layers of color and detail, subject matter also starts to emerge.  It's a happy time for me, it seems like these two are finally coming to life.

 I'm reading this on the side- Owls in folklore and natural history.  It's good to know more about owls and people's relationship with them as a myth over history.  I am reading this one at the studio so it doesn't interfere with my reading at home.  After I finished War and Peace, the book literally fell apart and has ended up in some of my paintings.  Literally and figuratively.  I'm hooked on russian lit and am now reading The Brothers Karamazov.

Another series, a new collaboration, a couple of paintings in progress

I am working now on a series of 5 small paintings, preparing to teach my class- working in a series- which starts up next wednesday at  the Pullen Arts Center.  My idea was to superimpose mushroom drawings which I had done on rice paper over paintings of houses.  Working title of series is something like- "little houses spring up like mushrooms".  You can see behind the painting my awesome mushroom i.d. book which I am using as reference for the drawings. 

I'm starting a new collaborative project with Alison Overton, here are some free samples of the very beginnings.

The imagined cityscape paintings- a small series of just 2 paintings- are still in the works.  I am concentrating on building up layers of oil paint, some of it linework, some of it thin glazes, and some more thickly painted areas.  Ah, oils, my first love.

Getting excited about my show with Megan Clark!! Also new paintings in the works.

It's hard to believe it's been almost a year now since Megan Clark and I first had the idea to do a body of work based on nature.  We started collaborating on ideas several evenings, drawing together at my place.  We were also inspired a lot by the book "Art Forms in Nature" by Ernst Haeckel.  We decided to do  some collaborative work.  Her metalwork will be attached to my paintings!  I'm excited to get her pieces back from being gold plated and attach it to the paintings I did.  Here is a sneak peak of some work I did for the show..... I have been working on these paintings all year, in secret!  Keith just recently saw them for the first time.  It's been so fun working with another artist, collaborating.  The show opens September first friday in the upfront gallery at Artspace.  

Here are some brand new ones I have just started. They will be oil and encaustic. I am just layering the oils now to create a background.  I wait for each translucent layer to dry before adding the next, hopefully to achieve a depth of color.  I also like the way I can get a smooth, subtle color transition using oils.  Not as easy with the encaustic paint!

 Here are two I have just started.  I used rice paper maily, and some fabric too in the Seahorse one.  The one on the left may end up with a swift in it....

 I love their eyes!

 I am also working on "twin" oil paintings, building up layers of color.  I try to remain very free with the paint at the beginning stages, trying to loosely sketch in the composition with paint.

Awesome student work pt.2

I have been busy this past week teaching and encaustic class for jr high/ high school students at Artspace.  I have been super impressed by what the kids have come up with.  I have just showed them the techniques, but left it up to them to come up with ideas.  They are giving me some great inspiration!

Madness

 I've been working really hard on these small 3 x 5 panels.  The idea is to hang them in grids for my show in September with jeweler Megan Clark.  There's not a lot of space on these panels so I've had to simplify my ideas which has been a good exercise for me.  I keep returning to the same themes in this series of small work: developing sketch portraits of friends and strangers, using rice paper to draw them with ink pen and adding in collage elements like fabric or pages from War and Peace.  Also animal portraits too of course.  It's been fun working on 20 paintings at once!

New small series

Here are the beginnings of 4 small 3 x 5" paintings.  The idea for this series of small paintings is to integrate drawings out of my sketchbook of people and animals with my encaustic painting techniques.  The people drawings were likely drawn sitting in the library, airport or a restaurant.  I like to sketch quickly to keep the drawings lively, and I don't want the person I'm drawing to know that I'm drawing them.  With these paintings, I add color to these drawings, putting each person or animal into an environ.  

Here is a video of the new transit center, and all the artists talking about their work that hangs there.  Keith and I are both in this video.

And thanks to the miracle of the internet I have been able to track down one of the paintings that inspired me to start painting in encaustics.  This piece is by Victor Brauner, called Prelude to a Civilization.  I remember seeing it in a museum in NY.  

layers of wax

This is a mixed media painting I've been working on.  The dog is made of some cool vintage fabric I had.  You can see the background started just white, and the surrounding background was made by adding layers of colors and fusing and mixing the colors with a heat gun.  

At this stage I started to add some rice paper that I had painted and also do some incised lines.  I started to manipulate the white background with some coral colors too. I gave the dog a collar, and also some more colors and lines.Today, I added some stenciled raindrops on the white ground, and gave the dog some fur.  It's a lot of additive marks, and a lot of scraping.  There will be more layers on this painting before it is finished.  

Finished painting.

Awesome student work!! Next class starts in August!

I had a great time teaching my last encaustic class.  It was a small class of just 2.  My students, Cynthia and Carrie, both had done a lot of art in the past but this was their first try at encaustic.  It's exciting to see how the medium can change your way of thinking about painting.

These two paintings are by Cynthia Cudaback.  She comes from a marine biology background, as you can see in the piece above.  Along with the encaustic paint she used magazine cutouts and three dimensional elements to create this painting.  The painting below is also her creation.  It represents the four seasons.  She always does her snowflakes with six points, as this is how the occur in nature.  The chemistry behind the water molecule is what causes snowflakes to form with six points, and it also is what makes life on earth possible.  So, from now on, my snowflakes will also be six pointed, because when you make a six pointed snowflake you are showing gratitude to mother earth.

 The painting below is by Carrie Graham.  She layered and fused the encaustic paint to create the watery feel to the background. Then she painted the lily pads, using the incised line to outline them.  She also added collage elements along with rice paper paintings of koi fish.

If you are interested in trying this versatile medium my next class starts up on August 10.  It's a series of six classes that are designed for beginners or intermediate encaustic painters.  It meets wed. nights at 7:30 at the Pullen Arts Center.  For more info, call the center at- 996-6126.

Forming ideas for future paintings

 The stairway to the field.  Just a small little piece of land downtown that I walk by on my way to the studio.  I love these old steps that lie in beautiful neglect.  I wonder what will become of this little patch of land, if someone will bulldoze it and build something.  It's in a state of flux, neither here nor there.

An old building on St Aug's campus that I love.  It's being reclaimed by nature.  If you were to walk in the threshold you would be engulfed by trees and weeds.  Incidentally, my step father in law's father used to perform eye surgery in this building.

My wildflower garden!!

 I love gardening but have rarely been able to grow anything from seed- until this summer.  Here is my wildflower garden, grown from a pack of seeds given to me by a friend.  The colors are phenomenal and I run outside every morning to see what has bloomed.  I do believe I can use some of these colors later....

Beginning of a painting

I love the new arrangement of my encaustic pallette.  Now instead of a bunch of large tins of color, I have many small tins, resulting in many more color options.  This should really make my life easier. Wax drips and buildup between my pallette and painting.  On the table and the cord to my heat gun. 

Here are several layers of color built up on my newest painting.  This shot is before it had been re melted.  

Heat guns are fun.  

Cool effects I got through several layers of colors and several passes with the heat gun. I am using some wax that is really opaque, and some that is very translucent in order to get this look.  

Finished painting.

The mysterious sea and the new transit building

Here are some details from my newest.  It's pretty much done at this point.  

The idea for me was to paint the sea in a darker palette.  The sea is loaded with symbolism.   I think of it as a metaphor for the unconscious mind.  

The buildings on the seashore are mixed media.  I used some monoprints that I cut up, and a gouache painting.  Using encaustic paint really helps to tie the mixed media pieces together.  

The left half of the green building is a monoprint I made using the netting that you get onions in.  The right half is a sealed envelope containing a secret message.  It is completely encased in wax and painted over. 

Finished painting.

Here is the new transit building located on Poole rd. in Raleigh.  You can just make out my painting in this photo, right above the orange-y divider thing. This image was originally an oil painting-  I cropped it and it appeared on a CAT bus a few years ago.  Little did I know, they had saved the image.  A few weeks ago I got an email from the transit people wanting permission to use this in their new building.  I was thrilled to have my work permanently installed!  

Here you can see it a little better.  I am told the art will be lit up really nicely at night.  I am hoping to go by soon at night and get some photos.

Here, you can see it from the first floor, walking into the building.

Here is the view from the second floor balcony.  

Winged Brother of a Cat

The Owl series is finished.  Just as I was painting these, I ran across something Thoreau had written on owls.....

.... sitting on one of the lower dead limbs of a white pine, close to the trunk, in broad daylight, I standing within a rod of him.  He could hear me when I moved and cronched the snow with my feet, but could not plainly see me.  When I made most noise he would stretch out his neck, and erect his neck feathers, and open his eyes wide; but their lids soon fell again, and he began to nod.  I too felt a slumberous influence after watching him half an hour as he sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat, winged brother of the cat.  There he preserved a peninsular relation to me; thus, with half-shut eyes, looking out from the land of dreams, and endeavoring to realize me, vague object or mote that interrupted his visions.  At length, on some louder noise or my nearer approach, he would grow uneasy and sluggishly turn about on his perch, as if impatient at having his dreams disturbed; and when he launched himself off and flapped through the pines, spreading his wings to unexpected breadth, I could not hear the slightest sound from them.  Thus, guided amid the pine boughs rather by a delicate sense of their neighborhood than by sight, feeling his twilight way, as it were, with his sensitive pinions, he found a new perch where he might in peace await the dawning of his day.  

Here is another new one I am working on.

A detail of the dog. 

The face before and after I worked on it today.  

Finished Painting.

New series started!

Here is the beginning of a new series. Seven small paintings of owls- encaustic. Owls have long been a favorite animal of mine, hence a great subject. Wise and cunning, owls offer infinite design variations. Although all of these are being done with the same color palette, different colors are emphasized in each painting. Working in a series is fun. I have ideas for a few more small series of paintings, stay tuned.

Bright colors for a grey saturday

Really, I thought we were done with this kind ofweather for now, but that's o.k. I'm pulling a double shift in the studio today, making my own bright colors. Here is a tiny piece of the painting that Keith and I are collaborating on. Oil and wax on wood. The panel is actually made from a piece of our kitchen. This will be the 4th collaboration Keith and I have done.

Here is a little bird that has made a nest. Based on a real life scenerio that I saw while walking in to my studio one day.This is an exert of a painting I just started. All encaustic.

Take my class! Come to my opening!

Here's an example of the kind of work I want to teach in my upcoming mixed media class at the Pullen Arts Center. This began as a collage of an old book, an old lino cut print of mine, one of my oil on paper paintings cut up, and some fabric. I coated it in clear wax, then made some lines on it with encaustic paint. Sound fun? Come take my class! 6 Wednesdays starting March 30th. 7-9:30 pm. 919-996-6126

ps. This is the painting I am going to donate to Artspace's Give and Take event.

Here are the postcards for my show at at Peace College! If you didn't get one in your mailbox, you must not be on my mailing list. To remedy that situation, you can send me your address- annapodris@earthlink.net.
The show's reception is Sunday March 20th from 2-4. It's up now at the Leggett Theater Gallery, and will be up until April 17th.

Everything is new under the sun

Yay! I finished my triptych, again. This time I will hang the three panels about an inch away from each other, kind of the spacing in this photo. This one will go in my Peace College show, starting Feb. 21 with the artist reception Sunday March 20 2-4pm. First day of Spring! After re-doing this piece, it was tempting to go back into more of my work, there are endless possibilities for each painting. But now I am enjoying starting some newer work.....
Dragonfly stencil and a hand. This one is just about finished, I'm sure I will put final touches on it. I had remembered a drawing of a hand, maybe from an Indian incense box, and wanted to paint it with this lady. She's bringing me good fortune.
Here is a brand newbie. I did the background colors with oils, to make a smoother color transition. I wanted to do one with overlapping line drawings. Also I am doing more paintings with people in them now.
A detail of the above painting. The encaustic linework actually hovers above the painting encased in a layer of clear wax. That's how it's able to cast it's own little shadow...
The sea at night. I haven't seen it lately but in dreams. I do miss living near the ocean.
Here is another painting I started out in oils, to have a smoother color transition from light to darker. Inner peace.
This one has been through a lot of changes. I sometimes find the smaller pieces even harder to make than the big ones. You can see through the wax to almost all the layers here, so you get an idea of the process just looking at the painting's surface.
And another one that has been painted and scraped back over and over again. Under all the wax is a piece of vintage fabric.

Looking through a glass onion

A few glazes later. I am trying to keep this one really loose.
Two new ones. They're probably 80% done. Although, it's hard to know. I'm not sure what's next for these....
These are details from my triptych that I am re-doing. Birds are partly made of vintage fabric.
This is a strange cat lady. She just appeared there, she's not fully realized yet but she does have some big hair.
This is the top corner of the 3rd panel of the triptych. Like a little kid, I want to put the sun right in the top corner!