Contemplating energy and environment

Layers, transparencies, and a depth of materials.
Encaustic waxes combine with transparent oil paints.
An underlying support of canvas, burlap, and linen interwoven through the work.
Gradually layers move on and off the surface,

In search of a connection between
the way that I sense, and
the way that I come to understand
the natural energies at play in our environments

Natural space is a systemized organic arrangement.
Inhabited space is a rational human construct.
They evolve in parallel
Spaces are altered by humanity
humanity adapts to spaces where humans exist.

One fluid medium invades another.
An unstoppable force
and an unmovable support.

Paris Wave

One fluid medium invades another.
An unstoppable force
and an unmovable support.

Paris Wave

One fluid medium invades another.
An unstoppable force
and an unmovable support.

Burn

The thinly laid acrylic image
takes the substantial background support
and runs with it like wildfire

Focus, focus, focus
ripples of concentrated energy converge
or maybe they diverge
from this singular point

the way that burlap and constructed canvas shapes
interact with wax oil paint and wood.
structure on structure on structure
mighty solid in its integrated form

Sinking in. Staining. Indelible.
Witnessed by the moon.
No, its just a knot in the wood.

Impression Sunrise - how little alteration of a 2x12 piece of lumber does it take for us to read it? A pinch of cerulean pigment in beeswax and one white line. How quickly it impresses landscape into our consciousness.
And here is another impression on reclaimed lumber....

Used Motor Oil
and Garage Dust
on Floorboard

It is like Richard Dawkins story of the mud puddle.
In The Blind Watchmaker,
he imagines a sentient mud puddle.
It is making the case for intelligent design
over evolution by stating that
"only an intelligent designer could create
a dent in the ground that so perfectly fits
the shape of its muddy water.
This environment, this dent in the clay,
could have only have been designed
with mud puddles in mind."

Hmmm. Maybe it is the other way around.
Maybe it is the mud puddle that is
conforming to the dent that happened to be
in the ground,
in the place
that the water
fell to earth.

Are humans master of their environment?
Or over the generations,
are they continually being evolved,
for good or ill,
by the environments they fall into?

All this from Plaster of Paris,
with a thin layed of acrylic paint,
scratched through.
I think the mud puddle musings
are simply a result of the fact
that the muddy plaster fell through
two bolt holes in the underlying support
of found lumber.

Acrylic Paint. Stop.
Plastic Joint Compound. Stop.
Colour Action Gloss. Stop.
Pick out the woodknots with white. Stop.
Witness and Reflected Echo of Witness. Stop.

Abstracted use of material in layers.
Active grounds interwoven between
surface and substrate.
Centered on a suggestion of landscape or environment

A codependent interchange of energy
between material layers and surface imagery.

This is a picture after 3 months of buildup....then the deconstruction started.

would you like to see its final state?