Ribbon Cutting at Les Beaux Arts Gallery

I'm getting excited because Friday, June 21st at 4:00 pm will be the ribbon cutting at Les Beaux Arts Gallery where my work is on display in the Village at the West End in Greenville, South Carolina.
While we've been open for a few months, with great crowds at our First Fridays Gallery crawl and other events,  we decided to hold our grand opening and ribbon cutting in conjunction with our neighboring gallery, Midtown Artery.   This is such a fast growing area, long the local arts district - bohemian and diverse hosting a number of galleries, boutiques,  jewelers, local eateries from places like the Zen House to Naked Pasta. All local businesses! 
Les Cormier, owner of Les Beaux Arts is such a lover of the arts that his excitement is contagious.  Every time a new artist arrives, his eyes light up, and  you can see how invested Les is in the mission of his gallery which is to bring a very diverse selection of art to the public's eye.  He works tirelessly on recruiting new artists and cultivating visitors to the gallery and he and his staff of Patricia Wilcox and Szag Randahl are eager to talk about their artists backgrounds and their art and educate the viewing public on the various mediums and styles found in our gallery.  Everything from woodworking to painting, pottery to encaustics.  
Ever since being in the gallery, I've met so many wonderful artists and learned a great deal. We host close to 40 artists now in our gallery alone and so many have become teachers and friends, from Llloyd Thibodeau who taught me about the vanishing point to Patricia Wilcox who helped me a great deal with composition on my abstract landscapes. since I'm constantly experimenting and learning, I welcome every suggestion, comment, critique and bits of advice. 
Hopefully by Saturday, I'll have some great photos!

Encaustic abstract landscapes

In continuing my series of encaustic landscapes, I've worked both with oils as the under painting on wooden cradle boards with  overlays of  R&F

white beeswax which I melt with Damar resin to create my medium .
Or, I tint the beeswax medium  with oils to produce the atmospheric effects I want solely using beeswax.
 In my current series of abstract landscapes, I'm trying to create a mood, mysterious somewhat melancholy, probably due to the New England weather where  countryside and mists offered such moody landscapes over the fields around where I lived as a young mother.
I grew up in the city, but lived in the countryside near a lake for about ten years and passed horse farms and large colonial farmhouses when I drove into town.
 Since my mother was born in London, I've long been an avid Anglophile and love landscapes with lonely towers, castles, manor houses, cathedrals and church steeples.

So I've created a series of towers and ruins both in oils and encaustic on wood as well as with oils on canvas.  I like the richness of the oils as the base and the addition of the encaustic beeswax creates a dreamlike mystique.
The beeswax overlays also make the paintings more cohesive somehow.  It doesn't blend the paints as I feared when I brushed the hot wax over the surface or disturb the lower level even when I've only allowed it to dry for about a week.
But once completed it creates a subtle effect by virtue of the wax textures giving the viewer the illusion that they're viewing the architecture from a distance,  The atmosphere appears heavy with moisture. And the gleaming finish you achieve when you polish the wax with a soft cloth makes it all  luminous. 
I work on boards as small as 2x2 and go up to 11X14 preferring smaller pieces which can be combined and hung together.