I am thrilled to have been accepted as a member artist at Archway Gallery.  It is a 30-member artist co-op — Houston’s oldest artist-owned and operated gallery.

My initial installation I have titled “Playing all my cards”.

I spent untold hours growing up in the 60s and 70s playing cards.  Solitaire, hearts, spades, pinochle, old maid, gin rummy, mille bornes, etc, etc.  One big assignment for a computer science class at ISU was to program a game of solitaire (in FORTRAN if I remember).  Later I got into playing bridge, competitively for a short time.

Taking this influence from my past, mixing in some of my spinning technique, and adding a nod to the game strategy that is a certain aspect of today’s art business, I came up with the title “Playing all my cards”.

This will be my primary exhibit through November, so stop by Archway Gallery for a closer look.  They are at 2305 Dunlavy St, 77006, which is a little north of Westheimer, in the Montrose, just west of the Westheimer curve.

 

For Labor Day we visited NYC, complete with a trip to the Museum of Modern Art where I saw Jasper John’s iconic encaustic flag and targets.  More on those in a later post.

You may think this is horrible, but the thing that gave me the most inspiration was not any of the masterpieces in the gallery, but this cheap 3D doodle contraption that was in the MOMA gift shop.

How could I use encaustic & image transfers to create 3D art?

This led me on an Internet quest through the various methods in use today.  While I concluded early on that I could not hand out the blue-red 3D glasses to everyone to view my pieces in all their 3D glory, I did spend quite a bit of time researching stereoscopy — having two images side-by-side with the left eye look at the right image and vice versa.  This website has many example of what are called cross-eyed stereograms.  You may also recognize some of these as those laser prints that were in mall kiosks in the 90s.  I could certainly do some diptychs with the two images.

I eventually concluded that I could not expect people to stand in front of my art for 5 minutes while their eyes blurred into cross-eye.  I only had about 2 seconds to make an impression.  And this whole concept didn’t veer toward modern or fine art.  So that idea got shelved.

This past week I started using a deck of cards intending to create more of my guilloche spinners with them, but as I started doing pieces with a single card image, I found I could deconstruct the layers and separate them between layers of encaustic.  My King of Spades piece has 5 image layers.  The result is a pretty darn good 3D effect if I do say so myself.

My 3rd place win at Archway Gallery’s show inspired me to create more pieces that spun an image round and round (like a record, baby).

My next piece, Red wine guilloche, took the spinning to the extreme:  twelve image layers with two encaustic medium layers between each.  Atop that I etched out a string art effect and colored using oil stick.  This is also my first piece successfully using color image transfers vs black & white.

Getting back to my New Orleans-ish flourish themes, I next made Tchoupitoulas, just four multi-color image transfer layers.  For this I managed just a single encaustic layer between each, giving a subtle transparency between layers.

Spin the bottle is a variation on the earlier red wine piece, with eight image layers separated with single encaustic layers.  I was really happy with the result of this and here my black float frame really makes this piece pop.  I have gotten several reactions that people first think it is a red flower until they recognize the wine bottle and glass.

Finally, Girando el muerto (spinning the dead) is a nod to the approaching Dia de los Muertos.

All of these pieces are on exhibit at Heights Art Studio & Gallery through early December.