R&F Handmade Paints

One of the speakers at last year’s Montserrat Encaustic conference was Kate Smith, a conservator who had cleaned the encaustic murals in Boston’s Trinity Church.  I stayed a few days after this year’s conference to visit the church and see the murals first hand with Francisco Benitez who shares with me an interest in the history of encaustic.

The murals were painted by John LaFarge, an American painter and decorator, in 1876-77. LaFarge was the personal choice of Henry Hobson Richardson, the church’s architect, to do the murals in spite of the fact that he had never painted on a large scale before. But La Farge had by that time a long association with encaustic having been introduced to it 20 years earlier in Brussels by Henry Le Strange. Le Strange had used encaustic in 1855 to decorate the west tower ceiling of Ely Cathedral in England. La Farge began to use encaustic in 1863, initially for easel paintings, and it became his preferred medium for the rest of his career.

Work on the Trinity Church murals was begun in late 1876 and continued through the bitter winter weather in the unheated and unfinished church, often competing with masons and other workers for use of the scaffolding.

The type of encaustic that La Farge used and his reason for using it were different from how encaustic is generally thought of today. In his previous work, he combined wax and oil. Bu the common practice for encaustic mural work was to use colored sticks of beeswax and resin (usually copal, a very hard resin, or elemi, a soft sticky resin) that were melted into a heated solvent, either turpentine or oil of spike lavender. Venice turpentine was sometimes also added. The paint was applied warm or cold.

This gave La Farge a medium that could be applied relatively quickly over dry plaster, as opposed to the painfully slow process of buon fresco in wet plaster. It also gave him a bright but matte surface that resembled the traditional fresco. For that reason, he did not fuse his encaustic.

The question that is often asked today is whether this is really encaustic or a form of cold wax painting, similar to that used by Brice Marden. There is no easy answer. Encaustic has historically been defined by its principal material (wax) or by its technique (fusing). The term encaustic, coming from the Greek, “to burn in,” does refer to the technique. But needn’t be the deciding factor, and we are certainly not intending to make any judgment here.
La Farge intended his work to be considered encaustic, and as with encaustic, the work that I saw at Trinity Church is as vibrant and beautiful as it must have been 130 years ago.

The last of 2010’s Visiting Artist Workshops at R&F wrapped-up last week with Cari Hernandez, who came from Northern California to share some of her alternative methods of object making in a dynamic 3 day workshop.  Cari got her class all charged up!   If you missed out, or are not aware of Cari’s work take a look here.

The Visiting Artist Series is one of our favorite programs because it brings popular working artists to our studio facility to share exciting techniques with a small group of lucky students.  Be on the lookout in 2011 for another installment of this incredibly successful series.  Teaching artists on the roster include: Cat Crotchett, and Alexandre Masino, and Lorraine Glessner.

R&F was greatly honored to be the recipient of the first Krider Prize for Creativity given by the University and College Designers Association. The presentation took place during UCDA’s 40th anniversary and annual conference in Minneapolis on October 2. The prize was presented to Richard Frumess by UCDA Foundation board member and frequent R&F workshop participant, Barbara Esmark.

The Krider Prize was created in memory of UCDA member John Alden Krider to honor “creativity wherever it may be found.” As stated in the announcement, UCDA recognizes “that designers draw their inspiration and influences from a broad range of fields and experiences. Therefore, the criteria for the Krider Prize is deliberately broad to reflect that creativity takes countless forms and is demonstrated in many ways.”

UCDA gave the award to R&F for our company’s “creativity and demonstrated impact on the industry and the community.” In specific, the Association acknowledged

• Our role in the revival of a previously under used and misunderstood medium that impacts many others (photography, design, painting, sculpture, ceramics, drawing, collage);

• Our influence on, and assistance to, artists across the country through our workshops and high-quality encaustics and oil sticks;

• Our creation of jobs for artists in teaching, training and production of waxes and paints;

• Our policy that allows students to use studio space and virtually all materials for free;

• Our promotion of art and artists through our public exhibition gallery; and

• Our creative, nurturing and productive environment.

Richard, in accepting the award, pointed out that UCDA was honoring many people in granting this prize – our teachers, our workshop and gallery director, our office staff,  hundreds of artists who have contributed so much to our workshops and exhibitions, and, not least, our paint makers, for at the core of all of our activities is our wonderful and beautiful paint.

The $1,500 prize will be set aside for R&F workshop scholarships for UCDA members.

R&F Gallery Directory Laura Moriarty was recently on our wonderful independent Hudson Valley radio station WKZE talking about the Gallery, Encaustics and the upcoming show  “Nancy Graves Encaustics”.

Click the following Link to Listen in.

LM Interview

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'Areol' by Nancy Graves, 1978 Oil and encaustic on canvas, 64 x 88 inches

The Gallery at R&F, in cooperation with the Nancy Graves Foundation and Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, is proud to present an exhibition of little-known encaustic and mixed media works by the late painter and sculptor, Nancy Graves. The show will run from October 2^nd through November 20^th, 2010, with an opening reception on Saturday, October 9^th, from 5 – 7 pm. Linda Konheim Kramer, Executive Director of the Nancy Graves Foundation, will speak at the opening.

Nancy Graves’s personal aesthetic emerged in the later 1960s in the form of realistic life-size sculptures of camels. These works were rooted in her childhood memories of the animals preserved by taxidermists in the Natural History section of the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts and in the idioms of Abstract Expressionism taught at the Yale University School of Art where she was a student in the early 1960s. The interplay between the replication of nature and the formal values of abstract art was to inform her work throughout her life.

In 1972 Graves took a break from sculpture and turned to painting. Between 1977 and 1984, she created nineteen encaustic and mixed media paintings, seven of which are featured in this exhibition, the first to focus exclusively on Graves’s use of encaustic. In her unpublished ‘Notes on Paintings’ of 1978, the artist gives a technical description that mentions encaustic as but one of several methods used to help her achieve a “depth of field through layering”, where the process could be understood as the meaning of the work. This series of vibrant works is a testament to Graves’ abiding interests in natural phenomena, geology, archaeology and cartography. Their aerial perspective suggests mysterious, colorful maps of imagined territories, which strongly relates to a series of prints that the artist completed in the early 1980’s.

'Equivalent' by Nancy Graves. 1978, Oil and Encaustic on canvas, 64 x 100 inches

Nancy Graves was born in Pittsfield, MA in 1939. While studying English literature at Vassar College, she received a fellowship in painting to the Yale-Norfolk Summer School. From 1961 to 1964 she studied fine art at Yale University, New Haven, CT, and in 1964 received a Fulbright-Hayes grant in painting to study in Paris. In 1966 she moved to New York and established a studio. Her first solo exhibition was in 1968 at the Graham Gallery, and the following year she became the first woman artist to have a solo retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1985 she received the Yale Arts Award and in 1986 Vassar acknowledged her accomplishments with an exhibition and the Vassar College Distinguished Visitor Award. Solo exhibitions of her work appeared in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Buffalo, New York; Cleveland, Ohio; Fort Worth, Texas; and Aachen, Germany. In 1991 Graves married Avery Leete Smith, a veterinarian in Kingston, NY. Graves died of cancer in New York on October 21, 1995. The Nancy Graves Foundation was established in 1996 through a provision of the artist’s Last Will and Testament to give grants to individual artists and to maintain an archive of her life and work and organize exhibitions of her art.

Please join us at The Gallery at R&F for the opening reception for this impressive exhibition on Saturday, October 9th, from 5-7 pm, when Linda Konheim Kramer, Executive Director of the Nancy Graves Foundation will present a brief talk about the artist and her work.

On Saturday, November 6th, artist Cynthia Winika will present a special one-day workshop in conjunction with the exhibition for artists who have an interest in Graves’ use of Encaustic with Mixed Media.