Gallery show closing Friday

What a full time this has been. We have been in the gallery everyday but last Monday. That was Cynthia's birthday and we had a dinner party for friends. Cynthia did all the cooking and it was incredible.

And this was just the appetizers

 

 

We are having a closing party Friday. If you are in the vicinity of beautiful San Miguel de Allende, stop in for a glass of champagne and choose any painting for 20% off the retail price.  There will be 5 new pieces of art for the silent Auction.

It has been many years since I worked in a gallery and it has been a wonderful experience. We made many contacts, good sales and I have been asked to teach at the Art Institute. Visual art need to be seen and experienced. Cynthia has been working in the front room. People are fascinated with the encaustic process and love watching her fuse the layers with the torch.

My show is up

My part of the show is hung. The gallery is wonderful. Right in the center of town. It is very old, and I find it charming. We had crowds of people in the gallery yesterday, I think people like to see a work in progress. One young Mexican woman found price errors on a couple of tags. I did not have enough zeros for the peso exchange. The dollar is so high right now that the peso price looks huge.

Cynthia has many small pieces for her room. She had 2 men working most of the day yesterday getting nails into the ancient walls; so today she can hang her work.

Here are some shots of my placement.

contemporary encasutic on very old walls

I love the arches and try to visualize what this building looked like 400 years ago

setting up in Cynthia's room

view from the front door

first room - still needs some lighting changes

This series is "Into the Silence, oil and encasutic"

encasutic/ mixed media with tranfers

New encaustic show in Pozos, Mexico

 Please click the link to open the video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4XYYms2dt4 I love this gallery and now you can see the space, the gardens and the art on this new YouTube video I just made.

Studio Visit

A delightful young couple from California came to my home/studio for a visit yesterday. They got to see a wide range of work, going back 10 years to the new painting I was working on. I did a brief demo so they would understand the encaustic process and was deeply touched by their comments and appreciation of my work. It means so much when viewers are moved by my art. It makes all the years of work, struggle for sincere inspiration, and continued expansion of technique, worthwhile. After they left, I finished the piece I had been working on. Here is it.

I'm back from the States

I arrived home Friday on a red eye. It is good to be back, but I was too tired to go to the opening reception that night at the Pergola Gallery in the Instituto in San Miguel.
Nick Hamblen, the owner and director of Galeria 6 in Pozos took lots of photos of the new show, including a wall of my work. Thank you Nick.

Inbetween time

This is one of the paintings that recently sold in Pozos. Nick came here today and paid me for it, the one below and some others.

My last two large paintings are finished and I am preparing boards for some new work. I've posted these before...I'm thinking of doing one more figurative from the old family photos and then going back to abstract.

Salsa, 10" x 10"

I sent five small paintings to Galeria 6 in Pozos. This is one of them and I just realized that I don't have photos of the others. That is rare for me because I "always" photograph everything before it leaves my studio - well, maybe not always.

Day 2

Group show in Pozos, November 6, Now Revolution

 

This is going to be a wonderfully diverse show. Everyone artist works differently. 

 

Now Revolucion
By: Nick Hamblen

  What does the word revolution mean to you at this moment in time, in Mexico? This was the question that was posed to the five artists of the new Galeria6 show “Now Revolucion.” Speaking as the curator of seven years of shows at Galeria6 I can honestly say the collective answer to this question has resulted in one of the most diverse, exciting and poignant shows we’ve ever had the privileged of presenting.
   The work here, expressed in media that ranges from digital imagery, assemblage, photography, installation, collage, encaustic and abstract painting causes one to think and likely to smile while doing so...


Well-known master, encaustic painter Ezshwan Winding’s revolutionary work for this show is in her words “about the underbelly, the subculture, the seething passion that lies beneath an enchanting surface...like we know Mexico to be.” Winding says that during the process of creating her encaustic pieces the work evolved on it’s own from figurative to abstract.
   “I discovered that the first, underlying paintings, images, words, figures and bold, passionate brush strokes that I put on the board, rose to the surface, covered by increasing layers of encaustic paint. The more I focused the fire from the torch, the more of the energy of the under-painting oozed up to the light. I trusted that these energies were growing out of the dark, reaching and pushing toward the light of balance and the result was a revelation.”  Fans of Windings work, I feel certain, will be yet again amazed at her ability to go further into the depths of her talent and process.

November 13, 2009

After my last two gallery shows of abstract work in Puerto Vallarta and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, I decided I wanted to go back to working figuratively in encaustic. I did a series of encaustic nudes a couple of years ago. They don't sell as well as my abstracts, but I love the figure and have been drawing and painting people since I was in third grade. I painted faces and figures of my beautiful Mexican neighbors and other women I have met in my travels here.

It is so much easier to paint figuratively in oil, but I have been using encaustic for ten years now and I am hooked. Besides, I have been giving encaustic workshops for years and I always want to push my boundaries. Its challenging to make faces in encaustic. I had to get back into my zone and stop overworking the paintings. I did a lot of scraping. The first portraits were 12" x 12" and are titled. "Keepers of Time."
The solo show entitled A Time of Witness is up until Nov. 29 at Galería 6 in Mineral de Pozos. Sales have been good and I am thrilled with the review:
"To speak about an art, which, by its very technique, values the power and vitality of a human being, is to speak about the artist's tendency to capture the phenomenology of details; phenomena that are naturally ephemeral: animal or human noises or sudden outbursts of energy that flutter in the artist’s vision. This is the driving force behind Ezshwan Winding's use of encaustic: the constant movement of shades and layers of color and the casual transformation of the wax act as agents of communication from a world which, in the fragility of its expressions, finds constant solidity... the expressions of the subjects, seen up close, hold the gaze of the spectator, who participates in a conversation of technique and mystery that envelops human forms, which seem to dissolve into abstraction...Winding seems to be suggesting a perceptible symmetry in the effect achieved by the colors. As if, by maintaining a communication with the work, we can detach ourselves and lose sense of the figure, leaving ourselves free to appreciate the color and texture that is absorbed in the painting. This is why her work is a map of life; every inter-connecting twist and turn, every color that comes and goes display an opposing flow, but at the same time end up coming together... Winding has become an interpreter of equilibrium... This is how, through the layers of encaustic, we see the artist's craft; her dedication and paradoxical brush strokes. The characters she paints lead dedicated lives, but lives that suffer the vagaries of chance. Winding, therefore, succeeds in presenting her subjects as testimonies of life; they are banners of the significance of time. There are no forced smiles or gazes veiled by some hidden lie. Her subjects become everyday people by showing their true selves and through the use of the encaustic technique. In other words, they hide what we all hide, but show what the artist reveals through her art – a cyclical and multi-dimensional transfiguration of forms to textures, to colors, to forms, to textures, to colors. Marcelo Leos, November 2009



The second show opened two weeks later. It is being shown at Galería Atelier in San Miguel and it is titled, Intimate Moments. All the work can be viewed on my website:www.ezshwan.com

After seven months of work. I am taking a short break from the studio.

Click on images to enlarge.