Art of improvisation

You can accomplish a heck of a lot using toothpicks, India ink, transfer paper, and paper scraps, as I found out in an encaustic painting workshop.
The first day of our workshop, in Penland, NC, Celia Gray, the instructor, discovered that the school had ordered the wrong beeswax. So we had to wait for a rush delivery. In the meantime, we were challenged to do some drawings. But I had not brought a real supply of drawing and painting materials, just the brushes and boards for doing encaustic.

So I dug up some toothpicks and a bottle of black India ink, and began a sort of poor girl’s version of sumi-e painting on pieces of handmade paper: pine cones, shoes, a pizza slice, my Dad’s lunchpail, and other objects associated with my childhood home in West Seneca, NY. I penciled in the street grid. I added the street number.

I created texture by drawing on the back of black transfer paper using the tip of a paint brush. Eventually, the bits and pieces were ironed together on a large sheet of vellum with melted beeswax.

It was all very free-form and improvisational, as much about enjoying the process as creating a composition. The result was a piece Celia contended was my most resolved in the two-week class, though I am not sure I agree!