ARTIST STATEMENT Ceramic sculptures have been a passion of mine since 1981. My subject matter tends to focus on derivatives of the human head because this provides direct and infinite possibilities of expression and emotion. Human hands, fish, and primitive-design functional ware are attractive subjects to me as well. I’m not entirely sure why my inspirations and energies go in the direction they do, but it has ties in some way to being a chemist/scientist, and the more I moved towards science, the tighter I held to my creative expressions in clay. There is yin-yang balance at play, the left-brain turning the screw in one direction (stress!), the right-brain screwing it back out (relief!). Whatever the basis, science and art for me have always felt deeply connected. Most of my sculptures are exaggerated somewhat, like three-dimensional caricatures or cartoons. For me, this embodies them with an important aspect of lightness and play. Encaustic painting uses a wax medium with pigments, typically applied it to a wooden board as opposed to paper or canvas. The technique dates back some 3000 years to the ancient Greeks who were mixing beeswax and tree resin to make a waterproof base for application to the bottom of their ships. At some point, somebody had the idea of adding colors to make things decorative. Your palette is a hot pancake griddle with cups of melted wax. The process ends up being almost more three dimensional than two because you typically apply many wax layers, one on top of the other, with a variety of techniques to obtain a variety of effects. Textures are possible, along with embedded objects like paper or cloth. One of the most delightful surprises of painting with encaustics comes as each newly applied wax layer must be fused to the previous layer by melting it slightly with a flame (I use a butane torch). The process is fascinating because you often feel like you are literally painting with fire; the flame has variable intensity and momentum and direction, all of which influence the way the wax and colors flow and appear.