Takoma Park artist Marilyn Banner’s luminous and highly tactile encaustic paintings will be on view at the Adkins Arboretum Visitor’s Center through Friday, January 27, 2012.

Focusing on the myriad colors and textures found in marshes and taking full advantage of the range of drawing and painting techniques possible in this hot wax process, she creates bold, richly layered scenes with a surprisingly broad range of character and atmosphere.

The next exhibit, the thirteenth annual Art Competition, will open February 14. The theme of the competition—Discovering the Native Landscapes of Maryland’s Eastern Shore—celebrates the Arboretum’s mission of conservation.The show will be juried by Erik Neil, Executive Director of the Academy Art Museum, Easton, Md.

 

Adkins Arboretum
12610 Eveland Road,  Ridgely, MD 21660
Phone: 410.634.2847

The color is lush and the countryside is spirited in Marilyn Banner’s small encaustic landscapes on view at the Adkins Arboretum Visitor’s Center through Jan. 27. Her paintings of marshes and farmland (with occasional goats, cows and horses) are built up with vibrant layers of translucent beeswax.

Encaustic “paint” is actually molten beeswax mixed with damar resin (crystallized tree sap), tinted with pigment and heated till it’s molten. The word “encaustic” means “burning in” and refers to the process of fusing layers of wax together into an extremely durable and archival surface. There will be a reception to meet the artist and learn more about the process of encaustic painting on Sat., Dec. 10 from 3 to 5 p.m.

Rhythmic strokes of green and ochre describe tall grasses surrounding a pool of water in “Marsh Rhythms,” a 12”-square panel. Banner built the surface up in layers of colored wax with shades of turquoise and pale green peeking through from beneath. Opaque white marks float on the surface, like sunlight on the reeds, and marks carved into the wax lend a sense of depth and distance.

“I can draw and paint and play with fire,” Banner said, describing how it feels to work in encaustics. “I think it’s magical because it’s beeswax. It’s natural. It’s very different from working with acrylic paint.”

Encaustic is a medium that has to be seen in real life. Its translucent depth and sensuous, luminous quality can’t be reproduced by photography or in print. For Banner, its strong physical qualities help her to hone in on the feelings she has for particular landscapes.

The meadows and foothills of the Shenandoah Valley appear in many of these works. Although Banner normally works in her Kensington studio, not far from her home in Takoma Park, she has had several artist’s residencies at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. There she can concentrate fully on her work while being surrounded by the beauty of the farmlands at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains. This landscape has become part of her, as have the marshes and beaches on Cape Cod where she and her husband, pianist Carl Banner, often go to visit Carl’s family.

“I can’t paint places that I haven’t internalized,” she said. “I have to feel the resonance of the place, how it felt to be there.“

Banner, who exhibits frequently in New York and in the Washington, D.C., area, sees her interpretations of landscape as poetic or even romantic. She works and reworks her images, often inscribing drawings into the wax and rubbing oil paint into the surface. She may add color or carve parts of the wax away, until the image resonates with her feeling for the landscape.

“That was my training,” she explained. “I was trained by an Abstract Expressionist who worked with nature.”

Taking the advice of this teacher at Washington University in St. Louis, where she earned a BFA, Banner learned to approach her work as an open-ended process of discovery, with much the same philosophy as the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s. After doing graduate work at Queens College and earning an MSEd at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, she experimented with many media from collage and photo transfers to mixed media sculpture, but since 2004, Banner has been captivated by encaustic painting.

The physical layers of encaustic medium dovetail with her feelings for the multiple layers of meaning in her work. For Banner, making art is a way of coming to know the inner world by exploring the landscapes of the outer world.

This show is part of Adkins Arboretum’s ongoing exhibition series of work on natural themes by regional artists, sponsored in part by Caroline County Council of Arts. It is on view through Jan. 27 at the Arboretum Visitor’s Center located at 12610 Eveland Road near Tuckahoe State Park in Ridgely.

There will be a reception on Saturday, December 10 from 3 to 5 p.m.

Adkins Aroboretum

12610 Eveland Road,   Ridgely, MD 21660
[email protected]
410.634.2847, ext. 0
There will be a reception on Saturday, December 10 from 3 to 5 p.m.

Adkins Aroboretum

12610 Eveland Road, Ridgely, MD 21660
[email protected]
410.634.2847, ext. 0

There’s a gentle archway standing in the forest at Adkins Arboretum. Made of curved branches found on the forest floor, it reaches up between two living trees, forming an inviting gateway on the peaceful wooded hillside.

On view in the Adkins Arboretum forest through Sept. 15, “Forest Arch” is part of an outdoor exhibit of sculptures created by collaborating artists Howard and Mary McCoy, of Centreville, from materials they found in the forest. The artists will lead a sculpture walk during the show’s reception on Sat., June 25 from 3 to 5 p.m.

The McCoys have been creating outdoor art at Adkins Arboretum every other year since 1999. For this year’s exhibit, they decided to create sculptures using only materials they found in the forest, so when they began work on the sculptures this spring, they brought only tools, ladders and some wire.

Centreville artists Mary (left) and Howard McCoy install “Jackson’s Vines” in the Adkins Arboretum forest.

An area of grape vines stretching up into trees along the path became a sculpture when the artists intertwined them with more vines that they had cut away from nearby trees. The resulting swirling tangle is called “Jackson’s Vines,” after the painter Jackson Pollock.

“Sometimes people will do a double-take to see if it’s natural or if it’s art,” said Howard McCoy.

“Nature recycles all the time,” said Mary McCoy. “We thought we’d do the same and give some of these branches and vines another life as art, so we titled the show Second Sitings.”

The artists picked out a pair of tall pine trees with Japanese honeysuckle, an invasive species, climbing high into their branches. To keep the vines from killing the trees, they cut them at ground level and pulled the ends from one tree toward the other. Meeting in the middle, the vines form a sculpture called “Swing.”

Howard explained, “An environmental issue was addressed, as well as making a sculpture. We saved a couple of trees from being choked by vines.”

“Clearing” is the most simple and direct of the sculptures in this show. To create it, the artists simply raked away the leaves from an 18-foot-wide circle under the trees, leaving a smooth area of rich, brown soil.

“At first you might think it’s just an empty space,” said Mary, “but then you realize that what was under those leaves is full of activity. There are the remains of leaves decomposing, becoming soil, feeding the worms and microorganisms so that new trees will grow there. It’s like exposing one piece of the ecosystem.

“We’ll keep it clear over the summer,” she explained, “but once autumn comes, it will disappear under the falling leaves. If you’re going to make art out in nature, especially if it’s about nature, it makes sense to let it change and decay naturally.”

This show is part of Adkins Arboretum’s ongoing exhibition series of work on natural themes by regional artists, sponsored in part by Caroline County Council of Arts. It is on view through Sept. 15 in the Arboretum woodland, located at 12610 Eveland Road near Tuckahoe State Park in Ridgely. Contact the Arboretum at 410-634-2847, ext. 0 or [email protected] for more information.

Adkins Arboretum is a 400-acre native garden and preserve at the headwaters of the Tuckahoe Creek in Caroline County. Open year round, the Arboretum offers educational programs for all ages about nature and gardening. Through its Campaign to Build a Green Legacy, the Arboretum will build a new LEED-certified Arboretum Center and entranceway to broaden educational offerings and research initiatives promoting best practices in conservation and land stewardship. For additional information about Arboretum programs, visit www.adkinsarboretum.org or call 410-634-2847, ext. 0.