I swing around encaustic paint like a little boat around a mooring. It's like an alter ego, sometimes it's a stern teacher, sometimes an unruly pupil. Sometimes it's a scout, leading me to themes, projects and studies, mistakes and discoveries. Its marks and surfaces are uppermost in the scheme of things.

Under the title "replication", I used borrowed images as found objects. Ancient artifacts, architectural drawings, lace fragments, maps and nautical charts, pieces of script, were tributes to the work of other hands. The image anchored the picture down so that the paint could swing around it.

Abstraction was inevitable (sooner or later). It was a big step and long coming, but the paint was patient. Now is the time to leave images behind, and let the paint itself be the image and the message. Sarah Petite April 2010

   
 

Encaustic paint is a suspension of pigment in beeswax, which is kept hot for brushwork. When hot it is "wet", and when cold,"dry". When cold it behaves like wax. Then the tools, instead of brushes, are knives, scrapers, chisels and claws. A heat gun returns the paint to hot, for working, fusing, melting and shining up. Layer, cut, dig, fill, scrape, layer, paint, scrape, melt, stand back and study, paint, scrape, trim, hang up in the living room, stare, walk past, turn lights on, turn lights off, return, paint, remove, melt, paint. At some moment it slips its mooring and drifts off , taking on a life of its own.
   
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