Gayle Gerson : Artist » Encaustics

Mother Bee

ggerson — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 01:36:44 +0000

My favorite bee encaustic.
This piece has been sold.

Encaustics for the Bees

ggerson — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 01:27:00 +0000

I just finished 3 12×12 box frame encaustic collage pieces for the Palisade International Bee Festival which happens on April 16th and April 17, 2010. The event is a response to the continuing crisis of hive decline among our most precious agricultural resource, bees. This art is part of an exhibition in conjunction with the Bee Festival at the Blue Pig Gallery in Palisade, Colorado.
Encaustic is an ancient art medium made from bees wax. The modern version also contains damar varnish and ready-made colors. I like to use collage elements such as papers, copper fragments, jewelry findings and beads which I either embed in the encaustic or coat with the encaustic to create a soft surface.
In “Bee Grid”, I included a part of a wasp’s hive, original drawings, and painted and found papers.
In “Buzz”, I used magazine advertisements from medical marijuana stores to build up the spiral plant forms, hence the title.
These pieces are meant to hang together, although they can be sold separately: $500 a piece, $750 for two and $1100 for all three.

Mini Dotties

ggerson — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 18:34:45 +0000

In response to The Blue Pig Gallery’s annual miniature show, I decided to do some encaustics on little 5×5 boxes. I knew I wanted the common theme of dots, so I made dots, using my magic Krink applicator, on many different pieces of scraps of painted paper and encaustic pieces. I started out with flowers in pots, but that quickly evolved into birds. As I was allowing the pieces to come together with wax, jewelry findings and the aforementioned dotted papers, phrases kept on popping into my head, such as, “Take Me To Your Leader” or “I Read Somewhere That Birds Are Descended from Dinosaurs”. So I decided those phrases needed to be the titles of the mini paintings. Of course, I decided that some of these titles were way too quirky not to be part of the art work and so I bought some little letter stamps and added the phrases to the face of the works, again using that Krink–which applies well to slick surfaces. This project was a great transition from the very meticulous work of the forest panels. Now my head is clear to pursue other forms of forest collages.