TexasWAX Artists Show Their Stuff

TexasWAX artists from Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio are exhibiting new Encaustic works at Gallery M Squared during the month of May. The reception is Saturday, May 9 from 7-9 p.m. This is the first joint exhibition of all four groups.
About TexasWAX:
TexasWAX Houston was the first group to organize in November of 2007. The Dallas group followed shortly after. In February of 2008, these two groups held an exhibition in Dallas that coincided with the College Art Association Conference held there.

The Austin wax group formed not long after. San Antonio artists who were driving to Austin for meetings decided to form a chapter of their own so by the end of 2008, TexasWAX had expanded to four chapters.

Each chapter is active with its own projects and exhibitions, sometimes in collaboration with a sister chapter. This is the first collaborative project of all four chapters.

Gallery M Squared is located at 325 W. 19th Street in Houston Heights.
Gallery hours are Wed - Sat 10-6, Sunday 12-5.

Interactive Blogpost-Rituals/Collections-Time: Rebecca Crowell

Contemporary Abstractions
What is predictable about nature is change---change of seasons, birth, life, death and ultimate decay. Built into that predictable cycle of change seems a core of randomness that ultimately enlivens existence and life's experience. But it isn't nature so much that Wisconsin artist Rebecca Crowell is addressing in her paintings. Rather, the random effects of nature's cycles on man's intrusions into nature. Our walls and buildings. With her process of selectively adding and scraping away, she makes paintings that at first glance, resemble aging and ancient walls. But the palimpsest-like surfaces of her work take us beyond "the wall" to another level of thought becoming parallel markers of the passage of time.

Old Wall: Pyrenees, oil and wax on board 24 x 18 inches, 2009

Rebecca Crowell's Statement:
One of the remarks people have about my work is that it seems to embody a sense of time--that my surfaces often appear ancient, eroded and weathered. This is a result of a process in which I build up layers of paint mixed with cold wax medium, and then selectively scrape, scratch and apply solvent to portions of the upper layers. I like the idea that form/process and concept merge in this process--although my work draws on many sources, weathered and worn surfaces in nature and old human-made objects are among the most important--and the way I interpret this source is by building up and then tearing down the paint layers. As in nature, there is a random quality that results from this process, though of course, I also edit and select in order to reach aesthetic goals.

Recently I spent time at an artist retreat in a small, medieval village in the Pyrenees Mountains of Catalonia, Spain, and later a few days in Barcelona. These were perfect places for feeding my love of ancient surfaces--old stone and plaster walls, worn paths, crumbling slate cliffs, and ruins of old barns--all very beautiful to me. Abstracted interpretations of these surfaces have become an important thread in my recent work.