Glowforge!

Sine Surface, acrylic, LED lighting, 19"x14"x5", January 2018

This piece will be part of CoCA's upcoming Art Intersects Math show. I worked around my favorite curve, the sine curve, in this case, integrated to a surface. I well remember a wonderful moment in calculus, when seemingly intractable problems became a breeze by converting to polar coordinates. My notes, and beloved polar coordinate system made it into the piece as well. 

It took a lot of engineering, quite a lot of math, and even some coding to execute Sine Surface. And it was all made possible by my newly arrived Glowforge—a laser cutter/engraver. The latter is an incredible tool. In a few short weeks I've used it for everything, from scoring tape of encaustic painting masking, to installation work, to engraving fabric, and innumerable side projects. There will be a lot of Glowforge assisted work appearing here in the future. 

Pacific Series

Last November I travelled to French Polynesia, my first trip to the South Pacific. It was a completely new landscape and set of colors to me, and well worth engaging. I'm working on a series of large work to explore the forms, color, and type of movement encountered. I like to start with watercolor sketches, I like how the color behaves and I try to preserve the same translucence in encaustic. I'm moving to small scale panels now to work out strategy for the build of the large versions. I will break for some color studies because my color mixing still needs a bit of work.  

Work in Progress: Glitch of the Screen

My good friend and frequent installation collaborator, Dara Solliday, made an amazing color mixing book for her own use last summer. She used oils for her project and it made me curious to see how the same or similar pigments would behave in encaustic. I'd also been mucking around with the idea of bringing my previous way of working with color—on a screen—to a solidly physical medium. And so Glitch of the Screen was born.  

Here, I try to mix colors normally only seen on screen, and possibly some flashier print media, in a translucent medium. Sometimes the pieces are internally harmonious and sometimes they are jarring. They are designed to work as a large formation. I am aiming for thirty 8"x8" panels in the series, I'm currently at no. 22.

Measured Entropy Installation

I was recently selected to do an installation in the City of Auburn's "Art on Main" space. The installation goes up at the tail end of October, opening to the public Friday, November 3rd. Build to start in studio September-October.

The basic concept is order moving to entropy. Most of the visual mass will be formed by several hundred rulers—like the ones you used to have in classrooms in my day, or you get at hardware stores now.

November nights are long and dark in the PNW so I will be using a variety of lighting including optic fiber and suspended desk lamps. I will be incorporating lots and lots of small found objects and polaroids as "complications". The space is large: 17'x9'x3' and I'll be honest, I'm pretty excited about this one. I will post progress photos once the build is underway.