Gallery Spotlight: Addington Gallery

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Instead of the usual sponsored post, I asked Dan if I could write about his gallery in my own words based on conversations we’ve had.  It’s fun talking to Dan about encaustic art because he’s passionate about the medium and the way each artist uses it differently. He described Mark Perlman as a madman in the world on Encaustic art.

The madman of Encaustic art? What’s going on? What does that even mean?

Mark Perlman is perfectly sane, it’s his work that’s totally rogue.

To step back and start with the basics on encaustic painting. Point one, it’s ancient, dating back to the 4th century BC (link features Greek person painting in wax, as one would expect to see).

 And  point two: painting with wax is very hard to do,  it’s hard to control, and you have to work fast because wax goes from molten-lava hot to dried candle wax in about 10 seconds. And like other mediums in which it’s difficult to master the basics, when a medium like this grows in popularity, a lot of the practitioners get lost in the technique, they become “Encaustic Painters” rather than artists who have to be working with Encaustic materials. And with this popularity, classes follow, which evolve into academic studies and before you know it….  there are a whole lot of rules.

Dan Addington is, himself, an encaustic painter – and he’s been doing it a long time, before it got trendy. In turn, he’s a fan of Hersh, Perlman and others who have been doing it even longer than him, before the schools and the hobbyists got their hands on it. Before the rules were written. So Addington’s aesthetic, and Encaustic posse could possibly be defined in that way: pre convention.

Which gets back to why Perlman is a madman. He’s drawing on some of the layers, throwing in oil paint and other odd materials into the mix and giving the work texture and a wild-abandon feel.

Now, Howard Hersh, who was featured in the previous exhibit, is also pre-rules, yet he has a completely different approach, and balances the geometric with the inherent chaos of encaustic.

So how to tell the Encaustic painters from the artists who work with wax? Addington gravitates to work that has a conceptual level to it, artists who are going for a specific idea, and not just expressing their feelings through random splashes of color.

As Addington  pointed out, “Encaustic has a visual archaeology that exists in each piece.  Because you can see the translucent layers, it opens the door to the process. With much painting, the top surface is often the only surface the viewer can access. With encaustic, you can dig down through the layers and see the history…”

Addington Gallery is at 704 N. Wells St., in Chicago. The current exhibit is still open through the day, and the next exhibit opens next week,  6/4.