Artist's Statement
For over 20 years, encaustic has been my painting medium. Experimentation with prepared wax mediums and my own cold wax emulsions preceded my long-standing love affair with molten beeswax, where what goes on under its translucent surfaces interests me as much as what happens on top. My paintings are constructed by pouring or painting with brushes to create multiple, often translucent layers that can be filled in, scraped down, carved, piled up, heated to a smooth as satin surface, or worked in a textural impasto approach.
Work that began in early 2002 spoke of a yearning for a quiet refuge, simplicity and order in a noisy, stressed and chaotic post 9/11 world. Control in art is a myth, but I nonetheless tried to establish some foundations of order to help guide me. Moreover, although I began those pieces instinctively, I was both reacting against the complicated organic forms of the natural world that I had been using for years, and revisiting and re-implementing in new and different ways ideas I explored in the early 1990's.
However, since the completion in fall, 2009, of my 25-Year Painting and Drawing Retrospective at the Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA, my work is evolving yet again in response to looking back at three decades of work. The long-time loves of order and the unfettered line remain. My art is synthesizing into an ongoing search for structure in nature's organic world while simultaneously exploring the poetry inherent in the flow of harmonious order.
- NAN TULL