Sculptural Paintings

So it's been a while since I posted on here, and I realize that. Partially it's because I kept forgetting, but it's also because I was really quite lost for a while. I had felt like I lost sight of what I was attempting to communicate, and thus, didn't know where to go next. I contemplated my conversation with Jennie and did a lot of journaling in my sketch books...

After a couple of horribly simple paintings, some of which were just attempts at using the heat gun as my brush (with the encaustic) in order to keep myself working, I finally felt like I got onto something. As y'all know, my first piece in which I manually shaved the encaustic off of the MDF was somewhat of a failure because of the color choice and text mainly. (The one which incorporates an image from my childhood) The text in it was not working at all, so I took it off/re-worked the piece. I am more happy with it now than before, but I still am unsure what to project onto it for the melting process, if anything. However, I became very excited about using the peeled/shaved encaustic off of the MDF (I'm in love with the degree to which it is translucent), and have been working on what I'm calling a sculptural painting. The following are images of the re-worked childhood-image-piece, and the pre-stages of the new one:


the re-worked piece:

Aerial view (I like that it looks as though another image has already fully melted in the bottom left hand corner of this image):

This is the new piece before I took it off of the MDF:

Here's all of the above encaustic taken off of the MDF - it is an extremely delicate and time-consuming process. Sometimes I had found myself inadvertently holding my breath when I was doing it because I was afraid of ripping it by accident haha! (this is it before I started cutting it apart and sculpting with it):

It still upholds the idea of a palimpsest, but because I'm sculpting with it the history of information ends up being obscured and abstracted that much more.