Mom worked as a waitress for all of my childhood, and wore a uniform at work. But she had movie-star looks (think Lana Turner), and liked to get dressed up a bit for Bingo, wearing a nice dress and some of the many pairs of earrings and necklaces she owned.

In memory of Mom’s Bingo dresses, I did this piece in encaustic wax, combining collage, image transfer, and pigment on a 6-inch square wood panel.

I remember the years when he came home with his work clothes covered in orange dust from the coke ovens. I remember he wore steel-tipped boots, and carried an aluminum lunch pail, and how he was sure to kiss my Mom goodbye each day and tell her he loved her, in case he didn’t come home. I remember how it became a running joke about Mom asking him if he “wanted cheese in your sandwich.”

At work, Tony became “Ray,” the wise-cracking, authority-questioning guy that his coworkers depended on for laughs and wisdom. At home, he was the man who told my Mom stories while he sat and ate food she had ready for him, if she wasn’t still at work herself as a waitress.

My Dad passed away in April, and thanks to a life insurance policy, I was able to attend Penland for two weeks at the end of June, where I took an encaustic painting and drawing workshop with Celia Gray. As I was preparing for the class, I decided to focus at least some of my work on my memories of my Dad and my Mom, who died in 2001.

This piece, entitled “Steel/steal,” was inspired by the nature of steelmaking: fire, smoke, and carbon. The title derives from the idea that the harsh working conditions of making steel often steal a worker’s health. (Ironically, I found out after I returned from Penland that during the early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, Bethlehem Steel produced radioactive steel rods for the atomic weapons program, unbeknownst to the line workers. It remains a forever unanswered question whether my Dad’s kidney disease, which eventually led to his demise, might have had its roots in the long-ago exposure to radiation.)

Steal/steal is encaustic wax, collage, and stamping on a 12-inch square board. The black clouds were created by overfusing pigment.

I love the final piece, in no small part because it was a struggle all the way. I evidently put too much pigment in the medium, so every time I tried to fuse another layer, the pigment smeared around. I worked and reworked the top half to achieve a textured, layered feeling that I so often admire in others’ work but have found hard to achieve. By serendipity, a classmate had bought a roll of twine and had extra to give me to make the bale shape in the right side of the work.

I used metal stamps to add Penland’s own Zip code. I painted on and then burned shellac on the bottom (a scary technique the first time I deliberately set something on fire!). I added red chalk lines traversing the composition, and added some old telephone wire from my stash of junk. I pounded a metal cooking implement of some kind into the surface and rubbed in black pigment.

All in all, this was a truly physical piece and a creative milestone.

My week lived down to expectations about the instructor, but exceeded expectations greatly as to the work I produced: a series of postcards from the mythical country of Climacterica, where all the residents are female, minds go absent, lists get lost, and intentions often go far off track.

Like most artists I know, I am REALLY hard on myself and nitpick my work to death. But I have to say, the set of postcards I created please me greatly. They hit my sweetspot of combining concept, humor, color, and writing. And several fellow students are in line to buy these once I get them reproduced.

I’m now researching the best way to reproduce the set and getting tips on selling my work from colleagues; so in a way, this could be one of the more transformative weeks at Penland for me, if it finally nudges me toward selling my work.

UPDATE October 27, 2009: My Climacterica postcards are now available for purchase, for keeping in touch with friends, giving as gifts, or framing. View the details and order at my Big Cartel storefront.