Land Deed, 24″ x 24″ beeswax encaustic

Land Deed, 24″ x 24″ encaustic SOLD

Welcome to my new blog! I’m really excited at this opportunity to be able to show off new work as soon as its complete, and to share my thoughts, progress and process with this fabulous medium of beeswax encaustic.

I’m currently preparing a lot of new paintings for the rapidly approaching Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition — Friday July 8th, Saturday 9th and Sunday 10th, at Nathan Phillips Square. This year I am once again located at Booth Orange 138, at the south west corner of the pool. All of my new work is encaustic — which I am mixing and layering with oil paint… sometimes also with collage, image transfer, watercolour, ink and graphite.

Also very exciting to me is my new path of more abstracted works. My paintings continue to be very much based on the landscape and inspired by the natural world.  However, I have been exploring new ways of expressing the concept of the landscape by incorporating ideas that are recurrent and important to me; ideas such as geography and maps; science and environmental conservation; weather; exploration and navigation; history and memory; and the concept of one visiting an unknown terrain and one’s attempts to make sense of it.  I’m fascinated, as well, by the charts, documents and iconography that represent  human efforts to effect, manage or classify an environment – an environment over which the indomitable force of nature — I like to think — will prevail eventually.

I find the medium of beeswax encaustic marvelous for exploring these diverse concepts. Beeswax is a sensual and organic medium – it seems very much alive – and works in harmony with my intuitive, archaeological-like process. I build up layer upon layer of wax and oil, then scrape and excavate —  adding and removing, obscuring and revealing, until I have achieved a surface that is rich in depth, luminosity and texture, and an image replete with history, atmosphere and meaning.

So I’ll be posting more new images asap — a bit of a preview of what can be seen at the TOAE.…. and I hope to see you at the show!

Cheers!

Into the world of Blogging!

Greetings! This is my first post — I’m new to blogging, but hope to keep things infinitely more up-to-date than ever before. If you’re looking for images from 2007–2010, my original website is still available for viewing.

I hope you’ll like my new images and thoughts.

Please email me if you have any questions.

Best wishes, Laura