Hills & Trees Series

The Hills & Trees have been hibernating in my mind for a long time: they are done in the same fashion as the painting which won the Cover art contest: collaging Japanese chiyogami papers and images of trees in combination with other techniques. In some I used the shellac burn, which is a fun, but unpredictable process.

As shellac is a nasty substance (flammable!) you definitely want to do this outside, with a wad of wet paper towel handy!

Brush some shellac on your painting and let it dry for a couple of minutes. Nudge the shellac with the flame of your propane torch until it breaks up in finer shapes. You can repeat the process if you feel you need more of the effect. To finish brush on a thin layer of medium and fuse.

The Shatford Centre, Penticton, B.C., will be the venue for this first valley wide exhibit

that features artists from the North Okanagan, Central Okanagan and  

South Okanagan-Similkameen Chapters of the Federation of Canadian Artists.

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The Ripoff Artists Retrospective Show is still on until Jun 23:

Leir House cultural Centre  

220 Manor Park Avenue, Penticton.

May 12 to June 23, Monday to Friday, 10 am to 4 pm.  

http://www.ripoffartists.ca. 

We order our lives, building structures and memories, seeing what frays or falls apart, seeing what remains. I make paintings as an observation of this process. I set the conditions, I influence without predicting the results. With the application of light and heat, new life emerges. In my painting I value the materiality, the process, and the laws underlying the formation of the natural world.   

As a child I found solace and soothing in the touch and scent and rhythms of grass moving, leaves rustling, bark under my hands, watching the movement of the great storms progressing in the Midwestern sky. Nature became my most intimate contact, my reassurance of ongoing life.

Now I create my encaustic paintings using a slow, labour-intensive layering of beeswax and pigments, with graphite and organic materials from the earth itself. I then engrave a pattern moving over the surface, repeating a rhythm found in nature. Graphite and other sediments fill the engraving, are wiped off and then fused into the melting surface as I slowly move a heated lamp over the surface. The interaction of light and heat, sediment and surface, recreates processes seen in nature--fractal formation. The form appears to be in the process of changing or breaking down. This gradual disintegration implies an ordering of experience, a progression, a span of time and ultimate change.

Peter Selz in a review stated, "Mari Marks' works...are luminous encaustic paintings. Some are heavily textured, others reveal their smooth wax surface. Some are translucent, others appear opaque. They are open to free association by the viewer. They may suggest clouds, sand, rippling water, ploughed earth, heavy fog-everything from mountain ranges and deep canyons to beehives and fingerprints. They can also evoke a sense of turmoil as well as a feeling of peace. A special luminosity seems to emerge from the material and the process employed by the artist."

My encaustic paintings are created out of a deep sense of the oneness of humankind and nature. Through my paintings I seek to bring experiences of beauty, peace, and healing to a fractured world.

Mari Marks, Touch Sensitive (The middle panel of this triptych was stolen from the Conrad Wilde exhibition in 2009!)