New Exhibit at Dolphin Gallery: Encaustic Art: Exploring the Seen and the Unseen

“Encaustic Art: Exploring the Seen and the Unseen”. The exhibit opens Saturday, April 8 and continues through Sunday, April 30, 2023. A reception is scheduled for Saturday, April 8 from 2 pm to 4 pm.

Encaustic art is a 2000 year old medium dating back to the Egyptians and the Greeks. Larain Matheson tells us, “I’ve been exploring this medium of using beeswax and oils mixed together, for the past 13 years. My inspiration comes from the beauty of where we live, and I emphasize the elements of air, earth , fire and water, in my work.”

Matheson adds, “my tools are melting pure beeswax, mixing my colors by adding oils, and melting them at a high degree of heat. The process is labor intensive but allows me to mix many hues of colors which I paint on with brushes, onto a wood panel.  The process can also be subtractive where I use scraping tools or mixed media like photo transfers, collage , and papers, embedded into the wax. I fuse each layer with a torch, to the underlayer of color and wax. My work has between 5-15 layers of wax and oil paints in it, which creates the transparency and depth.”

Larain Matheson received her M.F.A, from U.C.L.A. in the 1970’s, where she worked with artist Richard Diebenkorn, who was influential in her perspective of the architecture of the landscape in California. “Of all the mediums I have worked in for the past 40 years, encaustic has captured my heart. I love working both in realism, from photos I take, as I walk the coastal trails, and also abstracting from nature. Encaustic painting allows me the freedom to explore and add layers from the unseen to what the finished painting will be, making the unseen more visible.”

The Dolphin Gallery is at 39140 Highway One, Seacliff Center, next to Trink’s, in Gualala.  The opening is on Saturday, April 8 and the exhibit will be up until April 30.