Portfolio
Russell Thurston
about it. I’m not trying to portray the natural world,
per se, but the sense or feeling that you have when
you’re in nature—the awe and the mystery of being
engaged with nature or science. My work reflects
the world I see and am trying to make sense of. It’s
a map of my feelings about the world, rather than
of the objective world itself.
GR: Do you start a painting knowing what you want
it to be?
RT: I tend to work very intuitively. I always have
a mental picture of the work in my head, but it
changes during the process of making it. You have
to kind of go with what the painting wants to be.
It’s very much like a journey without a map. There
will often be two or three versions beneath the final
painting that you won’t even see. I like knowing
those other paintings are under there, because I
can go back and liberate parts of them by scraping
into the surface. The work reveals its own history,
the story of how it was structured. There’s an
archaeology to the painting when you look down
through the layers.
GR: How has your work evolved since you first
started working with encaustic?
RT: When I first began with encaustic, I was used
to working with collage and mixed media, so that
aspect of encaustic seemed a natural extension
of what I’d been doing. Encaustic accepts collage
and mixed media elements very readily. So my
first pieces were collages. But as I became more
comfortable with the medium, I began to engage
much more directly with encaustic itself.
8
Fall
The Fountain, 2010, encaustic, tar mastic & mixed-media on wood. 49” x 48” x 3”
www.EAINM.com