Encaustic Arts Magazine Winter 2011 | Page 7

Gretchen Reynolds: How did you ever start working with encaustic? Russell Thurston: My art training was in photography and illustration and I worked in advertising in Chicago after grad school. Then I began doing illustration work for corporate clients and worked at that for a number of years. It was an interesting time to be working as an illustrator, since computer-based illustration was just becoming possible. I still liked making everything by hand then eventually used the computer to facilitate the final art. Then in the mid-1990s, I moved to Santa Fe. I loved living here, but it was relatively remote, in terms of corporate illustration work and everyone was starting to use stock, so the market dried-up. So for a number of reasons, I decided to really focus on doing fine art and see where it would lead. One day I was on Canyon Road, which is lined with galleries and I saw some work in one that really attracted me. It was some encaustic paintings by Betsy Eby. I thought that they were so interesting and the surface was so beautiful that I decided I wanted to learn how to use that same medium. GR: Did you know much about encaustic at the time? RT: Not really. I’ve always loved Jasper Johns’ encaustic paintings, the look of them, the way he built up the surface, letting all the brush marks and drips show. But I’d never tried to use the medium myself and didn’t know anything about the techniques. I took a workshop that was being taught by Paula Roland, a terrific artist, here in Santa Fe, and I got hooked right away. GR: What was it about encaustic that hooked you? RT: I loved the seductiveness of the medium, the luminous quality of it. I also loved that you could see the hand of the artist in the work. It was so different from the more impersonal, slick, computer generated pieces that I’d been making and I liked that aspect. GR: Did you find encaustic easy to work with? RT: (laughs) No! Anyone who’s tried painting with encaustic will tell you that, initially, there’s a steep learning curve. You can’t paint with encaustic in the same way that you can with acrylic and oils. You have to heat and fuse the layers, and you have to work very quickly. It can be pretty unforgiving. At first I got frustrated a lot. With some time and more research about the medium, I learned to accept encaustic on its own terms and then I started getting the results I wanted in the paintings. Tree (How the West was Won) Detail 2010, Encaustic, metal, string, tissue paper and wood. 6’ x 3’ GR: What makes working with encaustic so unique, do you think? RT: I love the properties related to the seductive surface, the tactile feeling, and the fact that you can manipulate it in so many ways. So much of it involves heat and how it’s applied. But it takes awhile to learn to control. That’s not to say that you can’t make encaustic look like oils or other mediums, but it’s harder to work with and, for me, the pleasure of encaustic comes from finding ways to use its particular strengths effectively, instead of trying to make it perform like some other medium. www.EAINM.com GR: What’s one of your favorite aspects or strengths of encaustic? RT: I love that you can come back to an encaustic painting days, weeks or even years after you’ve first created it and work with the surface again. That’s pretty hard to do with oils or acrylics. Also, it’s a bit like alchemy. You transform the surface with heat and beautiful things happen on the surface and in the colors, some of which you can’t control. But if you know that’s going to happen, you can embrace the unexpected and incorporate it into the art. GR: What’s one of your least favorite aspects of encaustic? RT: It wouldn’t be about working with the medium, but about the realities of dealing with storage and shipping of encaustic work. It can be fragile and accidents happen if you don’t take precautions. I’ve had a painting melt in the back of a hot car in the summertime. Most encaustic artists could tell a similar story. You do have to use a little more care in shipping and handling, but I’ve learned how to deal with it. GR: In your work, what do you feel are your main themes? What are you trying to explore? RT: I think my primary theme is the collision between science and nature, or technology and nature. Is technology going to save us or be our downfall? That’s an issue that really interests me. If I had to sum it up in one sentence, it would be that my work is about the power struggle between nature and technology. I’m also interested in visually depicting the things that are unseen—particle physics, String Theory, interrelated systems. If I hadn’t been an artist, I would have been a scientist, but I couldn’t do the math. GR: Are you aiming for realism? RT: No, not really, not in the sense of representation. I’m more interested in our place in the natural world, my place in it, our feelings Russell Thurston Portfolio 7 Fall