Apprentice of Wonder

One Year Ago, in Chile

I can hardly believe that it was exactly one year ago when we arrived in Santiago, Chile with our dear friends Debby and Bob.  Debby has wonderful photos on her blog from our 18 days in Chile, but I've never really written much about that incredible trip, nor posted many photos, except for some of Valparaiso back in January.  Since Chile is on my mind right now, I thought I'd write a bit about it this week.

After a smooth all-night flight in first-class from Atlanta to Santiago, we arrived in Santiago in the early morning after flying over the bleak Atacama Desert and then the tops of the Andes which encircle the city of 5 million.  In a matter of 8 hours we had arrived not only in a new country and a new continent, but an entirely new hemisphere!  But the warmth with which our two host families embraced and welcomed us into their hearts and their homes is universal, and put to rest any lingering concerns of traveling to a foreign country.

After embraces and kisses by all, we were whisked away to the spacious and comfortable home of our hosts, Rene and Martita, where we collapsed into a long nap.  But not before a slow drive through the traffic-riddled streets of Santiago.  First impressions are of green, green everywhere in this city completely surrounded by tall foothills that roll up into the white snowcaps of the Andes, and exotic flowers everywhere.  I am stunned by how completely modern Santiago is - so much so that if not for the signs in Spanish, I wouldn't have known I was in a foreign country.  My ignorance in assuming that Chile was at least somewhat a third-world country was immediately apparent, and banished.  I am surprised at every turn of my head by the modernity - fast food on every corner; huge grocery stores and shopping malls; modern banks, buildings and cars - the same gas-guzzling SUVs I see all over Denver.  I see only a handful of cars that look "foreign", the way they all did in Spain. 

We became instant and complete friends with our host Rene after a big "lunch" of fresh poached salmon, ensalada, pasta with a tasty garlic-and-parsley pesto and chopped chiles - and two bottles of this incredible wine that is very smooth.  I was worried about drinking Chilean wine due to the horrible headaches I'd experienced in the U.S. when I drank Chilean wines.  I have since discovered we can buy MontGras wines here in Denver, but just as with any wine-producing countries:  they keep the best wines right there in their own countries, and nothing Chilean we've bought here compares to any of the wines we drank in Chile, which were all extraordinary, and rarely more than $7 a bottle even for the best reserves.  This would be the first of dozens of bottles the six or eight of us would consume over the next 18 days.

Before we had time to digest the huge lunch, we were whisked away to Carmen and Jorge's home, where Debby and Bob were staying, for an even bigger dinner of grilled sirloin - and more wine, of course!  This is the other wine with which we become intimate friends during the course of our time in Chile.

As it turns out, my travel journal of Chile is full of more wine labels than words!  Our hosts will keep us brimming with laughter and wine.

I've rarely been as full in a day as I was after two HUGE meals within a few hours.  But I wouldn't trade a single bite of any of it.  It is just the first of dozens of meals whose memories I still drool over.

Encaustics - Day 2

I could hardly wait to spend another day playing with beeswax and pure color.  Today I brought lots of collage items and photos with which I wanted to experiment, and I discovered I love doing transfers of words and photos and images into the wax.  I have infinite ideas of ways I can use encaustics with my photos.  And of course I will share the results here.

This piece above was done on a piece of watercolor paper, and consists of several layers of words from one of my poems.  Up close the words seem to be floating in the layers of clear wax, and there is a lot of depth in these wax layers.

In this piece I was experimenting with getting a smooth surface, and so did not use a lot of pigment.  On top of several layers of wax I scraped/transferred a photo of Phenix into the wax, and when I fused the layers with a heat gun, the image of her face sort of rose to the surface.  (For a larger image, click on the photo).  Unfortunately some of the ink at the top of her head melted off, but the effect is mysterious and interesting, and this was my teacher's favorite of my pieces.

My final piece of the day was a quickie collage I did in about 10 minutes, simply painting some pigment over paper, using the beeswax as a glue for the wine labels, and then again over the wine labels to seal them in. 

One of the many cool things about this class was that DOZENS of honeybees kept flying into the classroom, attracted to the intense smell of beeswax. 

In Love With Encaustics!

What a wonderful art-filled week this has turned out to be!  In my weekly painting class at the Park Hill Art Club, we started a new five-week session that focuses on learning ink-resist techniques with watercolor.  I've long admired the look of ink resist, without really knowing how it was done, or what was involved.  The look is similar to that of a woodblock print.  Here is my first attempt.  I will be painting the white areas of the paper with watercolors, but haven't decided exactly what colors to use yet, but I do like the effect of the black ink.

But even more exciting than learning the ink resist technique has been learning how to paint with encaustics!  For years I have been fascinated with the look and potential of encaustics, but I'd never seen a class offered in the Denver area.  When I found one, I signed up immediately, and I was not disappointed.

Encaustic (hot wax) is, basically, painting with a mixture of hot beeswax and pure pigment.  Encaustic literally means "Burning In" and it dates back to ancient Greece. Beeswax is the oldest known pigment binder. The process itself is very simple. Pigment is added to molten bees wax and (often) some resin, which is applied to a hard surface.  You melt pigment on a hot surface and mix that in with the beeswax.  It is a perfect medium for collage, because you can imbed just about anything into the wax, and then seal it in during the final treatment of "burning in" which consists of passing a heat source over the surface, causing a fusing and bonding of the painting.  Encaustic has the advantage of not yellowing, of weathering well, being unaffected by moisture, and being able to withstand high heat.  It is great for creating texture and can be painted on any number of rigid surfaces.

For a history of encaustics, go here.  This site is also one of the only places in the U.S. that makes encaustics paints.  And although I have never seen her work in person, I greatly admire the encaustic paintings of Ann Baldwin.

The process is quite easy when you have the right tools.  After a one-hour demo, our teacher put us to work, and for the next two days we spent hours and hours playing with beeswax and pigment, and imbedding collage items into the wax.  I haven't had so much fun in years.   We began by just playing with the wax and pigments (I was using oil pastels and oil paints) and mixing and melting it around on the boards.  I wound up with a mess of just about every possible color melted onto the board, and while it was great fun, I wanted something with a concept.  I decided to try a hot iron over the wax, and it melted into a big pool.  Then I put a piece of newspaper between the wax and the iron, and to my astonishment this figure of a woman was melted into the wax - an instant transfer.  It was a newspaper photo of an ice skater, but with time and more wax and pigment, this was the result, which I thought was fun.  I'd intended to photograph each piece in stages, but I was so caught up in what I was doing I forgot.  The image of the woman was a happy accident.

My second piece of the first day was very different than what it has since turned into.  Originally the big crow was much brighter and in the forefront, but on the second day I transferred some smaller images of crows, along with words and layers of more pigment, more wax, and this was the result.  The wax surface wound up with dozens of tiny bubble holes in it, into which I embedded some beads.  It is a true mixed-media piece.

Altered Ostriches

I've begun to go through my hard drive to put some of the thousands of photos I've downloaded onto CDs.  I'm going to be posting some miscellaneous photos now and then that don't necessarily have a thing to do with each other.

Imagine our astonishment last November in central Chile when we happened upon an ostrich farm.  Of course we HAD to stop for some photos of these strange and unpretty (except for their long feathers) birds. 

I had fun playing with this photo in Photoshop:  first with the liquify filter, and then with the radial blur.

And finally, the polar coordinates filter.  Not all photos work well with these filters, but all of these make me giggle.  I've made some of these into ATCs and unlike my more "normal" photos, these go quickly.

A Favorite Tree

Don't all of us have a favorite tree?  I have many, but there is one that stands out above all others every autumn, and that is the red oak tree on the busy Denver corner of 6th Avenue Parkway and Holly.  From a distance it looks, simply, like any old tree.  It isn't until you stand beneath it in mid-October that you can see how deeply red it is.  I make it a point, each fall, to spend some time beneath this tree.  Here are some of my favorite photos from this year's visit.

 

I shall attempt to paint this last photo, perhaps my favorite shot of the day.  I love the cadmium red shapes of the oak leaves.

 

It's A Beautiful Day in the 'hood

Today was an absolutely PERFECT cool, colorful, heart-of-autumn day.  In celebration of it, we painted autumn leaves in my watercolor class this morning.  I had so much fun playing with leaves and swishing around colorful reds, golds, oranges and everything in between onto the paper, and what I wound up with is this painting above, which has already become one of my favorites.  We painted the backs of the leaves and pressed them into the paper, and used various techniques to splatter and create texture around them.  While we were painting, the voices of children called out to me from below, and this was the view from the studio window in the church:

I immediately decided I want to do more of these paintings in honor of my favorite season, so I drove around the old neighborhoods and photograhed several of the brightest trees I could find.  I began with this honeylocust tree just outside the church.  I love the contrast of the black pods against the yellow and blue.

Colorado has gorgeous autumns, though they tend to be primarily yellow and golds, with few reds - except in Denver itself.  There are Japanese maples, sugar maples, and spectacular giant red oak trees.

The best is when the red and golden-yellow are together.  Despite last weekend's heavy wet snowfall, which broke branches all over the city, we will still have a lovely autumn for at least another week.