Latest Encaustic Project

I am very excited about this recent project I did for a designer/actor friend of mine Kathleen Powers. She commissioned me to work on three encaustic pieces for the 2015 season brochure she was designing for the 16th Street Theater in Chicago. We've been working on it together along with Ann Filmer, the theater's Artistic Director, for several months and it is now printed! It was a wonderful opportunity and a very different experience for me. Kathleen was my art director and the designer of the piece and I was the artist. My design background definitely came in handy as we worked together to make sure the pieces fit in her layout and worked with her type design. There was a lot of collaboration between the three of us as we discussed the plays and brainstormed on images for each piece.

Below are the final pieces along with how they appear in the brochure panels. I worked on the lower two-thirds of the canvas specifically to accommodate the layout and then went back in to fill the area at the top. I wanted to maintain the focus on the part of the image used for the brochure so I extended the background and worked mostly with the colors and papers I had used in other areas of the piece. You'll notice the position of the dog tag in Graveyard of Empires is different on the original piece and in the brochure. For the brochure we photographed the piece flat  so we could position the dog tag and chain where we wanted it; for the actual piece, the tag is attached with wax and the chain is attached to the side of the canvas so gravity is doing it's thing.

I can't wait to see how they look on the posters!