FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 17, 2015
Contact: Tamar Russell Brown, Gallery Sitka — 978.425.6290
Encaustic Collagist to Exhibit Startling New Works at The Bull Run in Shirley
SHIRLEY, Mass. — Artist Jeanne Borofsky works primarily in encaustic collage, painting with hot, colored beeswax, a medium that goes all the way back to the artists of classical Greece. A native New Englander, Ms. Borofsky grew up “way out in the country,” which gave her a lifelong love of the natural world. Even her use of beeswax reflects her attraction to natural materials and methods.
The beeswax seems to capture the available light both at the surface and down to the substrate, creating a very palpable “feeling of depth” that paints simply cannot achieve. Since the material is translucent, light burrows down beneath the topmost layer and produces colors that are extremely vibrant and earthy.
Her lively improvisations on map imagery include incidental figures we often see on maps of late medieval and early modern times — whales and sea serpents and such — but also less likely creatures such as flamingos, elephants and octopi. The collage objects embedded into the encaustic jostle against script in various languages, sometimes more than one in a given picture, sometimes from printed ephemera and sometimes penned or painted in by the artist. Occasionally the scripts appear to be Ms. Borofsky’s idiosyncratic creation and hence will not be translatable into anyone’s language but her own.
Strangely, it seems that the ephemera, many of which are printed items we use in our daily lives — postage stamps, bottle caps and so on — have an enduring quality that the wild, rich, swirling fields of color do not have. The washes of color seem to be part of an invasion of the natural world into our cozy urban world of printed words and lines on a map that have very particular meaning for us human beings today but which meant nothing in the context of the land or the sea thousands of years ago, and which may mean nothing again thousands of years in the future. The printed pieces and those solid found objects are what the viewer might be tempted to hang onto, while the interplay of light and color and images of wild animals appear to have the power to whirl us away in the wind. The competition between the two worlds is surprising and amusing and just a little bit frightening.
Naturally (so to say) other viewers will see the suggestions of the natural world as what gives the pictures any calm, quieting, centering effect, and may see the printed text and other ephemera as the source of tumult and danger.
Jeanne Borofsky, BFA, MFA, is internationally recognized, with paintings, prints and drawings in numerous private and museum collections. Ms. Borofsky has been a practicing artist for over 50 years. She has painted in many media, including watercolors, oils, encaustics, rubber stamps and collages. She is also a printmaker using many methods — traditional, photographic, encaustic and digital. She lives in Groton, Mass. with her husband Jerr.
The artist will exhibit these exciting new works at The Bull Run, 215 Great Road, Shirley, Mass., on Nov. 4 from 5-7 PM. Visit sitkacreations.com and dreamingprinter.com for more information about Jeanne Borofsky and her artwork.