Lisa Bick, Mixed Media Encaustic Artist, Tells Her Story

Sometimes my muse may be as simple as the grays, blacks and whites of a sycamore tree’s bark or the high altitude desert plants on my daily hikes in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Other times, inspiration is fired by the painfully beautiful setting sun over the Ganges River on a sojourn there. I find emotional solace in poets from Neruda to Auden and their words find their way into my work as well.

Bittersweet Pilgrimage, encaustic on panel, 30” x 30”

My journey has been long and well traveled. I was raised in Washington, D.C. where I was obsessed with the National Gallery of Art. My parents were history buffs, so they encouraged my love affair with the museums of our capital city. As a child, I knew my direction but not how to navigate my way. I was also deeply impacted by the unrest that simmered throughout Washington during those years. I was swept into protesting the Vietnam War (and consequently tear gassed during a march) and I was present on the Mall with my father during Martin Luther King’s speech. The local riots terrified me and I became politically motivated for the first time in my teenage years. I loved the heartbeat of the city.

I was set to stay in the Washington area after high school graduation when my first real and life altering tragedy struck. My oldest brother committed suicide two days after my graduation. It was an event that would color my world in ways I did not imagine at the time. It has filtered into my work, my dreams, my way of seeing the world as well as the way I was to nurture and raise my own three children. It also made me change my course. My father owned land in Indiana so I quickly decided that summer that Indiana University would be a place where I could escape the pain on my parents faces and the strange quiet that had descended upon us. I moved to Bloomington.

It was in Bloomington that I earned a fine arts degree with a focus on textiles. I found that creating massive silkscreens and woven hangings soothed my grief and gave me another outlet for protest. My early pieces were twisted Navajo patterns or natural objects cocooned in silk threads. I explored photography and photo silkscreens and spent summers in Washington photographing the buildings and iconic places I loved.

Hejira, encaustic on panel, 50” x 40”

After graduation and a young marriage, I briefly lived in London and Houston. I taught art at the secondary level in Indianapolis and then drew my artistic visions into the way I raised three children. I taught them to make paper and outdoor sculptural installations as well as to freely paint, draw, dye wools, plant gardens and act and stage Summer Solstice festivities on our country property. I was a hippie mom and that has never changed. Everything has always been organic and “of-the-earth” in my life. I even bought fleece from local sheep, which I cleaned and spun and dyed to make the sweaters my children wore for years.

In 2010, the stars aligned in a different way for me. I had a desperate need to return to myself and find another road to travel. My marriage ended, leaving deep scars that threatened to drown me on every level. There were days I couldn’t get up the mornings. I grasped at hopes and opportunities and found myself visiting a friend in Santa Fe where I ended up in an encaustic workshop. I was thinking I should return to school and perhaps pursue an MFA when that one weekend transformed me. I was intoxicated with beeswax and the organic nature of it and its smell and the translucency of layers of wax like Arabian Nights’ veils. I’ve always traveled extensively and there was something about the surface of wax that reminded of ancient places of the world. It felt sacred and earthy and I wanted to use it to once again express pain and process and hope and to mark my passage.

Springdrive, encaustic on panel, 60” x 24”

Because of its organic nature, wax can behave differently on any given day, due to pigments, humidity or the level of the heat source used for fusing. There is lots of scraping and smoothing and fussing with each layer of wax but eventually I begin to apply color and design. I often add my own handmade papers or snippets I’ve gathered from travels around the world. I start with deciding whether the work will be “warm or cool” - in other words, reds and oranges and yellows or blues and greens and violets. I find It varies with the seasons. The wax tends to find its own way but eventually we meet in the middle and something connects with a line from a poem or from my own emotional well. I might see a shape that reminds me of something and I follow it. Mistakes happen but I often leave them because I am marked with my own mistakes and wounds and all of that has validity. Through my art I can trace my travels, my turning points and my moments of illumination.

One of my small paintings, “Acid Rose”, emerged due to the landscape drawings of a man I loved once. All I had of him were his landscape designs on papers so I tore them to bits until one day I gathered them back to me and embedded them in wax. This little work became a statement on the subterranean layers of the earth - or the heart.

Varanasi, encaustic and mixed media on panel, 18” x 18”

“Varanasi” tells of my experience on the banks of the Ganges in India. It is a place that enters your soul. Varanasi is the holiest of cities for Hindus. It is desperately beautiful and desperately awful all at the same time. Saris in other worldly colors of saffron and acid yellows are hung out of windows to dry, and bodies are cremated while feral dogs wait for the remains. People chant, rejoice, worship, bathe and leave their loved ones in the river. I floated my little cup with marigolds and candles out into the river’s current as a way of honoring my own dead. A bit of paper I bought there hangs like a shroud from the top of the painting and a boat being oared through the water at sunset made its way into the piece.

Three years ago, I packed up my studio, my dog, two cats and a lifetime of relics and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I found a mountain I can call my own as well as a bright, artistic community. Summers of my past were spent in the south of France with my children and I have discovered that the light, the altitude, the lavender, the grapes, the stone walls and colors of adobe architecture mimic those young giddy days in Provence.

We Dance on the Swirls of Cloud Tops, Venetian plaster, oil and encaustic on panel, 24” x 24

I will continue this exploration of mine and will continue to tell my story because only I can do that. Here in northern New Mexico, the sky is my water.

Neruda: “This was my destiny and in it was the voyage of my longing.”

Acid Rose, encaustic and mixed media on panel, 14” x 14”

This is Week 22 of 52 Artists in 52 Weeks. Thank you for reading and sharing Lisa’s story today. To connect with her and see more of her work, please visit the following links:

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Christy Diniz Liffmann, Painter, Tells Her Story

    

My first exposure to making art was more about a way to live – by doing. Juracy Diniz, my Brazilian grandmother, was a power-house of a woman …. all 4’11” of her! She was a professional artist and teacher of porcelain painting for many years. It was from her that I learned to truly look, to appreciate beauty in all of its forms, whether man-made or natural.

Most of our time together was spent at our family farm – a magical place in the middle of a tropical coastal forest not far from Rio de Janeiro, up in the mountains. There was an exuberance of plant life; flowers, trees, vines and fauna – it was a never-ending visual feast. Having spent most weekends and all vacations there gave me ample opportunity to commune with nature.

Making and doing was part of the daily routine; gardening, cooking, painting, drawing, as well as doing all types of needle work. One media led to the other and one of my favorite things was to paint designs on fabric. Then I embellished them with embroidery, sometimes incorporating local seeds from marsh grasses.

My interest in Asian arts had its beginnings under my grandmother’s guidance: the seed was planted way back then. She studied with a Japanese master porcelain painter and later spent many years sharing her knowledge with many dedicated students. Researching designs used in Chinese and Japanese painting and porcelain decoration was an ongoing activity on the farm.

Later, the path to my artistic career was hardly direct. My first obstacle came early on when I came to the United States for college. My choice of major, Art, was emphatically rejected by my father. He said I needed to pursue something that would support me, such as the study of languages. He also admonished me that college would not be paid for if I got married during college. So, I studied Spanish and French, which turned out to be quite useful when I left college early to get married. Ha!

It wasn’t until many years and two sons later that I was able to go back to college and get my B.A. in Painting and Drawing. With much support and encouragement from my family, I continued my studies, received my M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing, and delivered my daughter (my most creative effort), within weeks of one another!

In time I was able to practice my craft. With three young children I somehow made the time to paint, show and teach. Forty years after my first exposure to Asian arts, I had the opportunity to study with an acclaimed Chinese artist, Wan Ding, who was a guest teacher at Louisiana State University.

After our initial studies, I was selected to be part of a study group that traveled to his Art Base near Xi’an. We spent a month filled with cultural sightseeing, being introduced to the practice of Tai Chi, brush painting, calligraphy and seal carving, as well as having the opportunity to make prints from ancient stele. This amazing life-changing experience continues to influence the work I make today.

Then, ten years ago my world became filled with the endless possibilities of color, texture, translucency, the aroma of beeswax and instant drying time when I took a week-long encaustics class with Paula Roland, a superb teacher and accomplished artist from Santa Fe, New Mexico.

With Paula, I learned safe studio practice, was given examples of a myriad of ways to make marks, textures and patterns on a “hot box” (an insulated box heated with 100 watt bulbs and topped with an anodized aluminum top).

Pigmented wax “sticks” are used to draw on the heated surface. Paper is put on top - burnished and voila, a print is born! This was a great instant gratification experience for me. I was pulled in hook, line and sinker ... I literally could not pull myself away from the studio.  

With Joanne Mattera’s book on encaustic, The Ancient Art of Encaustic Painting, I proceeded to spend countless hours experimenting and then painting in earnest. This painting process is incredibly forgiving – paint on – scrape off – paint again!

The not-so-forgiving part came in the fusing stage. Every mark you make with encaustic (Greek : meaning, “to burn in”) must be fused with heat – from a heat gun, or a torch, or even from the heat of the sun. This is definitely a challenging experience but once you become familiar with the process, it has its own unparalleled alchemy. Combining the ancient media of Chinese brush painting with that of encaustic became my preferred way of working.

When I start a mixed media landscape, I use quick ink or gouache sketches from nature. These studies become my “painted papers” which I then use for collage. Working with gouache, I build up surfaces before I switch to encaustic.

Using a heated stylus, I make myriad marks to create a textured surface not unlike a translucent tapestry. The ability to stop and start at will, without having to clean a brush is a very freeing experience. I often find myself losing track of time as layers are built, scraped, scored, and fused. Every time I do this, new and enticing opportunities present themselves.

These “archeological digs” keep me searching and discovering the endless possibilities inherent in the medium. When I finally come to a stopping point, an encaustic medium (beeswax and Dammar crystals), can be applied over the surface to create a smooth, glass-like finish, or it can be left as is. Stopping is so very hard to do!

Perhaps one of the most satisfying aspects of being a painter is to see people drawn in by my work. Encaustic pieces have a special light – one that invites the viewer to not only see but to touch. It is that very draw that keeps me warming the paint and giving thanks to the Greeks and the bees.

Observation and interaction with the natural world are crucial for me on a daily basis. Visual meditations become notations on place, space, color and pattern. I work on location or in the studio. When on location, I document en plein air through quick sketches.

Recurring concepts in my work come from my emotional connection to nature, thoughts on impermanence, life cycles, growth and renewal. When observing my work, I invite the viewer to revisit similar connections.

To see more of Christy’s work, please visit her website, www.cdinizliffmann.com.

This is Week 10 of 52 Artists in 52 Weeks. Thank you for reading and sharing Christy’s story today!