"Embodied" Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love The Cold Wax
In which I talk about how I fell in love with cold wax, upcoming holiday offerings, and what I'm reading right now.
I went rouge this year. As an artist known for her atmospheric foggy mountain scenes, going rouge for me is the equivalent of not playing “Free Bird” when you’re known for playing Free Bird. It’s like when Michael Jordan started playing baseball - a risky maneuver, but the man had to follow his heart, and it was begging him to hit home runs. I mean he’s a talented athlete regardless of the sport, although we all know basketball was were he really excelled, but I digress. This is not a story about basketball, and I am not the Michael Jordan of encaustic, so hopefully this analogy doesn’t even matter.
Many of you know of my new love affair with Cold Wax - I mean I did a whole 100 project with it this summer/fall and I’ve been pretty dedicated to learning the medium this last year and attempting to basically create a whole new style of art for myself. No pressure or anything.
But what many of you don’t know, is the worry and uncertainty that came with it. The months where I had no idea what I was doing, the paintings that ended up in the trash or got painted over, the feelings of longing about this essence I was trying to get from my brain, through my hands, and down onto paper. It’s a tricky thing being a creative, cracking open one’s soul and transforming the contents of that ooey, gooey mushy material so they live on the outside all on their own for all to see. Every day, we’re giving birth to our creations and just hoping they’ll take flight. Fly little birdie, fly.
Cold Wax has been in my periphery for a few years, flitting about on the edges of encaustic. They’re similar, both made from beeswax, but very different application methods. Basically, encaustic is hot and you have to melt it with electric skillets, torches, or heat guns to get it on the panel. Whereas with cold wax, it’s melted with a solvent at the beginning, is the consistency of lard when cool, then it stays cold the whole time, and you can do all sorts of techniques with it, like layering, scraping, collage, and mixing with other mediums. There are a lot of similarities between encaustic and cold wax and you can even combine them.
When I first heard about the new fangled medium, I was pretty dedicated to encaustic and couldn’t be swayed - I knew what I was doing and and where I was going. But cold wax was one of those things that kept coming up, like a new sport your friends are playing, and dear god, are we already to that age that my friends are playing pickleball? No actually it wasn’t like that, it was like a book your friends keep mentioning and think you would like. It’s not a romance with a HEA they say, but it’s deep and really beautiful. You might like it.
“Do I even have the time to learn a new medium?” I asked myself this last fall when I was contemplating signing up a three-day Cold Wax workshop with Salt Lake artist Stacy Phillips. Even just taking the course was a commitment, both in time and the ability to be a total beginner at something, but by the end, I distinctly remember the feeling. Because it was the exact same feeling I had when I finished my first encaustic workshop 15 years ago. It felt like home. It felt like winning big the first time you go to a casino. It felt like clarity. It felt like a new door in my house magically appeared and opened wide. It felt like a full fridge of ingredients.1 It felt like seeing an old friend in a foreign country. It felt like rockstar parking.
“Every search begins with beginner's luck. And every search ends with the victor's being severely tested.” The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
You see where this is going right? So, I’ve gotten the basics of cold wax, I’m in love, and I’ve got that post-workshop glow. But you know, I have a job, a life, and a family. I don’t even have two dogs at this point! I can’t just quit it all and run off to a remote studio in the woods and hole myself up cut off from the rest of the world by debilitating amounts of snow to dedicate my new soul’s purpose to this. I mean, at the very minimum, I still needed time to ski and bike and read romance novels.
But I did. Sorta. I was pretty quiet about it last year working on small paintings throughout the winter, testing out ideas, playing with color, and pushing the medium to see how I could make it mine. What you saw with my 100 Cold Wax Landscapes was basically round 2 (8?!) of teaching myself cold wax. I made all the mistakes and ugly paintings a long time ago. It was hard.
And wow, there were a lot of tears last year. A lot of struggle, a lot of almost giving up on this new medium, and almost giving up on myself. And at the same time, I was struggling with my day job, with the encaustics, something that was so ingrained in my being that I could practically make them while listening to some very steamy romance audio books without batting an eye. It was like I had grown a new limb, but it was so awkward that I didn’t know what to do with it, and it was banging into everything and knocking shit off the walls. Things were breaking. I was breaking. But perhaps I was breaking open, you know to let the light in, or something poetic like that.
Sometimes I went a whole month without working on them, because I would hit a wall, or just didn’t know what to do with it. But then I started dreaming in cold wax. That’s how I knew I was finally becoming fluent in German when I lived there working for a wind turbine manufacturer in 2003 - I started dreaming in German. So dreams of paintings starting coming, and my mind started making new connections. Like I started looking at landscapes in a whole new way. Neural plasticity is a real thing friends. My brain grew. My camera roll wasn’t just shitty pictures of trees taken from a moving vehicle. There were like actual planned and well-composed shots, mostly of fields with distant mountains, sagebrush and wildflowers, abstracted reflections that made me think of a meadow or a forest.
The paintings in my sketchbook began to shift. I got looser, more playful, less rigid. I though perhaps, maybe I’ll become an abstract painter.2 I wondered what it would be like to make something where if I messed up, I could fix it or change it, or even move an element. Cause that’s not something I can do in encaustic - once it’s painted and embedded in the wax, it’s pretty much there for good, and all you can do is move forward. Or destroy it, scrape it down, burn the whole world down and start from scratch. But I still hadn’t shared this with many people, it was like I was toiling away in my secret lab trying to build a rocket ship, and I realized I couldn’t just expect to get to the moon without any feedback on my design. So I started sharing, tentatively, so tentatively. I was very nervous showing them. I obviously threw out the bad ones, but I have a stack of about 60 paintings now that I still don’t know what to do with. Which is when I started the 100 project. I realized, I had to share and get it out into the world.
Which we’re going to skip in this post, because I already wrote about that whole experience, and you can go back to it if you want. Let’s fast forward to the part where Gallery MAR agreed to let some of the paintings for my new show be cold wax. THAT was a VERY exciting moment, BECAUSE it meant they were good. Well, they were good enough. But then. But then, I had to scale them up. I had to go from painting 5x5 inch paintings on paper, to painting full-scale, gallery-sized, behind the couch-worthy, hang it in your house and display it for your friends-suitable paintings. No big deal, right?
Very big deal friends. This is when the rubber meets the road and you have to put yourself out there and fucking go for it. You have to rip off the bandaid. You have to dare yourself and do the big reveal, on stage, sing at the top of your lungs, give it all you’ve got, full-frontal, kind of moment. Friends, it was terrifying. I don’t know how I did it. The first one I made was a testament to the idea in my head that it could be done. That it should be done, and by god, I was going to do it if it killed me.
It did not kill me, although it was painful. The first one was hard, really hard. I had to give myself a lot of pep talks. “Keep going, you can do this, you’ve done lots of hard things, you survived with Winter of ‘23 for heaven’s sake, you can do this.” The second one was a little easier. And by the third one, I was dancing while I was making it. Dancing I tell you. Jumping up and down, so exited, I was actually doing it, and dear God, is this what you felt like on the third day when you made the earth, seas and vegetation?
And then I made 8. Four 12x12 studies and four medium size paintings. A third of my new show “Embodied” is made using cold wax, and as of now, 5 of them have sold, which for an artist is a pretty decent confirmation that what you’re doing is working. Because the more paintings that sell, the more I get to make, and that’s my whole goal in life - to make cool shit and keep making. So, if you haven’t gone into Gallery MAR yet, please take a gander. Head out for some small business shopping, have dinner with some friends, and stop in the gallery beforehand.
Do me a favor too. Look closely will you? They aren’t just landscapes. There is a whole world in there. They are stories. Each painting is a tale about the world and our place it in. Each painting is an exploration of my and your connection with the earth. What is it telling you? What do you see? What will you do? Will you learn to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves, like I learned to love the cold wax?3
Housekeeping
Ornaments and Calendars will soon be available for sale! Stay tuned here with this newsletter to find out the exact date, time, and link. The link to buy them will only be given out through the newsletter. You only have to be a free subscriber, not a paid subscriber. Again, we’re donating to plant 10 trees with the National Forest Foundation with the sale of each ornament. Go big or go plant a forest. That’s my motto.
The Cold Wax Landscapes will be made available for sale to the general public on the same day! So if you’re a paid subscriber (you know a member of the club, you can still join FYI), you still have a chance to buy them now with your discount before I offer it up to everyone else. See them all in their glory and get a head start on picking our your favorite.
What I’ve Been Reading
I haven’t made much art since my show opened 10 days ago. I’ve been taking a break, and very pleased to say that I did not burn myself out like a candle with a wick at both ends this year. PROGRESS. But still, I have had very little inspiration to create lately (gee, I wonder why), and I’m doing my best not to feel bad about that. (I only feel like 60% bad ps, whereas in previous years I would have felt like 110% bad. So again, progress.)
What have I been doing these last couple of weeks to keep the dread from taking over my whole body? LONG WALKS IN THE DESERT. Mostly that. And reading a lot. Two really trashy romance novels that I’m not sure are worth sharing, but they did their job. And lots of Substack newsletters and online articles. So I thought I’d share a few of my favs.
I love anything Anna Brones puts out through her Creative Fuel newsletter, and you should REALLY sign up for her digital advent calendar that will start soon. It’s like holiday cheer x100 and a lovely way to slow down.
I just got turned onto The Bulwark and I’m enjoying their take on things, for a balanced look at politics, ahem.
This was an intense read, but I think it was really important thought exercise about how we need to start looking at our world to safeguard ourselves and our communities. Collapse will come again - be it another pandemic, natural disasters, record heat waves/droughts, or even worse. How do we shore up our local communities? How do we affect change? How do we actually help those in need? I’m really pondering this and how I want to make some changes.
I always liked E.B. White, who was known for Charlotte’s Web, but he was a pretty profound thinker and a prolific writer. A quote of his that has always stuck with me: “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
―E. B. White
I’m a huge fan of Maria Popova’s The Marginalian. A lovely place to go for inspiration. Pick a topic that you need a pick me up from and you’ll find a writer, thinker, artist, who has worked on that. This article on A Lighthouse for Dark Times was profound and deeply meaningful for me.
This is an old story written in 2011 after the Fukushima earthquake/tsunami disaster. I found the link through Mike Sowden’s Everything is Amazing (you should read his stuff too), and I was SPELLBOUND reading this story. Just incredible. The Man Who Sailed His House
UNTIL next week!!
Seriously, nothing makes me happier than seeing a beautiful fridge full of food and condiments and options. What do you want for dinner? Anything you want.
Simmer down. I’m not there YET.
Been making a list of old movies to rewatch, since new movies these days are mostly shit. Adding Dr. Strangelove to the list. It seems like a very appropriate time for it.
Wow, Wow, Wow wish I could see those larger "Cold Wax" pieces at Gallery Mar. I love color and excited that you are getting to explore the worlds color in your art.