Tim Burns works with what is known as photo encaustics. They are photos covered in beeswax, which is a centuries old Roman technique. Encaustic painting, also known as hot wax painting, involves using heated beeswax to which colored pigments are added. The liquid/ paste is then applied to a surface - usually prepared wood, though canvas and other materials are often used. Burns is inspired by the German painter Gerhard Richter, whose paintings look like photographs but are actually oil paintings. Burns’ pieces are mostly nature in a soft focus. One is a three-panel piece. “Beeswax gives a softness and nice texture that I like,” he says. “Everything looks sort of foggy.”
Martin Freeman’s series is entitled “Glitter and Be Gay.” Freeman is proud to be a client of Visual Aid, directed by Julie Blankenship. These are old paintings of his layered with glitter, varnished, and sprinkled with more glitter and more varnish and more glitter. “I don’t like framing, so I thought if I placed them on a larger space, that would be the frame,” he says, “except when I was done, I felt they needed frames, so I framed them anyway.”
Freeman also has a bizarre upside-down female mannequin with eyes in the knees and a nose at the crotch. This is all found object art.
Joel Hoyer’s pieces are mixed media with found materials. They are fragments and scraps and remnants turned into art. He makes large gilded panels with traditional gesso and pigments. “I have lots of little pieces left over and combine them,” he says. “They are all organic, so the gessos will go bad if I don’t use them, and I really hate to throw them away.” He takes little pieces of wood cut up and combined to form patterns. He frequently uses silver leaf or gold leaf on or around them. He always first tests the clay and stability of the gesso and pigments. He says, “It’s like cooking; I need to experiment to see how things will turn out as I make things from scratch every time, and I never assume it’s going to work.” He told an amusing anecdote of having a “relationship” with Nancy Reagan. “I never met her, but I made a picture frame for her in 1985 when I was working on a major project in Washington D.C., gilding a man’s estate with contract work,” he explains. His work now frames her official portrait. “We did a lot of work for the White House, but I’m not much into restoration or conservation; I would rather create my own work. Still, it was a fabulous learning process, working on pieces from George Washington in Mount Vernon.” He concludes, “I’ve always said it was because of Nancy Reagan that I have been making my own art ever since.”
Ginger Snap (not the well known drag impersonator) is showing a retrospective of past Folsom Street Fairs from 2007, 2008, and 2009 in a sort of photo montage form, each framed in clear plastic and arranged sporadically onto a larger clear frame but purposely sticking out. His shots depict all things Folsom – from leatherfolk to drag queens to fetishists to bondage to everything else. He says he goes to the Fair and photographs from the hip – meaning he purposely does not aim his camera or take posed photos, but instead holds the camera at his waist and snaps away unnoticed, spontaneously, and randomly - never looking through the lens. “Hopefully when I get home and look at them, I get some really wonderful shots,” he says. This explains why some are a bit fuzzy or out of focus, which gives the pieces special character. “That’s kind of representative of what it’s like when you’re at the Folsom Fair – where everything just seems to come at you at once in a kind of blur,” he elaborates. In one piece he has accidentally captured the backs of two Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and if you look closely to the right, you will see a sex act going on, “which I didn’t realized I had caught till I developed it.” His technique is to put varnish on top of different rectangles of Plexiglas, and he lets the excess drip down a bit, “which looks kind of like bodily fluids, if you know what I mean.” This random snapping is his tradition that he does every year at the Fair. I can’t wait to see this year’s Folsom montage!
If an artist wants to hang artwork, contact Thomasina DeMaio at artsaveslives@aol.com.
