Painting

Adria Sparhawk

Encaustic painting is, by its very nature, an act of elemental collaboration. Heated molten beeswax (an organic product of insect and plant partnership), is mixed with damar resin (natural hard trees sap), and earth pigments. Each paint layer must be fused with heat, a ritual that I find meditative. I build up layers of paint reaching toward that illusive…. luminosity. I delight in expressive brushstrokes, exploring compositions and color combinations, textures and subtle tonal variation.

My paintings often begin as pencil studies from life or plein air watercolors in the outdoors. This starting point then moves to the studio where the realistic details slip away to reveal the essential element that first drew me toward a view, an object or just a feeling. My work often explores ecological grief and the fragile beauty of our current epoch. The surfaces are scored, scraped, and incised, mirroring the heavy-handed mark human civilization leaves upon the land. But sometimes I just want to paint a sandwich or a simple little bird going about it’s business - and that is enough.

My hope is that engaging in this process of painting - of making a real thing that exists in the world, something you can see and touch and even smell, these physical objects made with human hands can act as a sensory conduit. By bringing the images and textures of the wild into the interior world can perhaps invoke memories of our instinctive kinship within the dynamic rhythms of the earth. I invite you out of our modern disconnect, to move away from passive observation and re-engage with our living earth.

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