Experimental art - my own quote

©Christine Linton

This is my personal view of experimental art.  I think you already guessed that!

Working with detail

Looking at the pic from 2 days ago, I followed a design idea from my college work and picked out a detail.

detail from encaustic wax  

©Christine Linton

If you look at that image, which was depicting rock strata in wax, this detail is near the top left.  Isolated like this, it looks just like a row of teeth to me.

My Experimental Day

Today I extended my skills with encaustic, and I feel I am starting to develop my own ideas of what effect I want to achieve and being able to see how to accomplish that aim.  Sometimes you can also see something extra to what you expected - I was aiming to show the strata in the rock formation along Linear Park, which has happened - Yay, success - but also I can see ribs ......
Encaustic, rock strata
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©Christine Linton

Experimental weaving - a string page

One of the experiments I did recently was weaving with plain string.  I made a page for a book by using some old wire as an outline approx A4 size; then I did irregular weaving with string, making sure not to have a neat grid.  I left all the tied off ends loose.  Then I melted some encaustic wax paints, and brushed them over the weaving.  You can see it is sitting on foil I recycled from microwaving potatoes, this foil just becomes discoloured but is usually quite clean and peels off from the wax easily.  Once the wax was dry I sewed on some bread tag beads.

Woven string page, painted with encaustic, bread tag beads - irregular weaving

Now, I have spent ages searching for a link to extend this post for you, trying to find some experimental weaving or weaving with string that wasn't regular and wasn't on a loom.  Spirit Cloth has some very interesting weaving posts, this is one of them.  Apart from Spirit Cloth and Windthread , who also have fascinating philosophical slants to their artwork, I can't find blogs or websites with what I'm interested in which is something different, not weaving on a loom, not nice neat stuff.

Skeleton Leaves

Skeleton leaves are fascinating but I very rarely find them.  They are also delicate and crumble.  I was so pleased with my latest encaustic experiment because it looks just like a skeleton leaf.  I was rubbing the wax block onto the raised backs of leaves and "ironing" them onto previously waxed paper - in this case, I had found that glossy photo paper works nearly as well as encaustic shiny paper, and I have several free packs of the glossy photo paper from computer ink pack purchases, so I don't have to buy new supplies again.

This leaf had been preserved in glycerine - see this link for information on how to do this; it remains supple and can be reused

This oak leaf was dried and crumbled as I used it

I have continued to look for hand stitching on encaustic, and finally found Sue Tyldesley, on her website - I particularly liked "Connected Flowers", on the right of the first line of photos.  You might like to see her hand stitching on encaustic at this link.

Skies - just love them.

Had lots of fun on the weekend, trying out my new encaustic set.  Bought the lot, after a demo and short practice at college.  Made myself work through my book to learn the techniques first, so after a few landscapes as in the book, I launched into my "own thing" :

Moody - with silver

Luscious - with gold and silver

Translucent - sunrise

When I do skies - which I love doing in any media - I tend to think of red/purple skies as sunrise rather than sunset.  I don't know if this is because I am more of a morning person or if it is because I am a glass-half-full person.

You can see another of my skies in this post - link below:
http://craftconversations.blogspot.com.au/2009/12/machine-quilting-with-thread-waste.html

I was blog-surfing for more textile art skies and found this one which is different but I rather like:
http://fiberfly.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/sea-and-sky.html

..... and blog-surfing for encaustic skies, I found this one which is also rather lovely, with lots of skies:
http://kathleenhooks.netfirms.com/encaustic_paintings/

I am captivated by skies, I've even got my husband taking photos of them, though the photo never quite captures the moment ..........

Nature Photography and Encaustic

Yesterday I went to see the ANZANG Nature Photography Exhibition at the SA Museum - stunning photography, and I encourage you to have a look at the Museum page with the entries, link below - the picture at the top changes to show some of the photos in the exhibition.  Seeing the whole exhibition is even better.  http://www.anzang.samuseum.sa.gov.au/ 
My own nature photography is very amateur though I have taken a few good ones - this is one I took of a gecko trying to escape from the house while my husband hosts it.

Another thing I did yesterday while I was in Adelaide was to buy myself an encaustic wax set - has the wax, the special iron, the stylus, the paper - we had a fascinating demo at college recently and I spent a couple of hours using the college set, learning this new skill.  As I used the results in a journal cover for the Pepper Street exhibition next year I can't show you them but on accessing the website listed in the encaustic booklet I found a YouTube video showing cool techniques with a hotplate - oh no, something more to save up for, looks so wonderful to work with ...... here is the link for the video - 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDQaOuWjOLM