In all, there are 11 artists each from Maine and Massachusetts, two from New Hampshire, and one from Connecticut in this thoughtful survey of New England encaustic artists. Like several other of the artists, Griffin created a multi-panel piece, hers a grid of twelve panels, each dappled with pink, black, and white encaustic in patterns that suggest various stages and intensities of a natural event, in this case apparently a snowstorm. My favorite piece in the show was “Snowstorm in July” by Jeanne Griffin of Holliston, Massachusetts. Her works have a tribal, ceremonial look and feel. She creates festive, feathery wall hangings out of fiber, encaustic, oilstick, paint, waxen line, and in some cases beads. One of the most unusual and restrained uses of encaustic is by Deborah Kruger of Florence, Massachusetts. Gregory Wright of Lowell, Massachusetts, makes bold, fluid organic abstractions that might actually be underwater seaweed beds, dripping and daubing wax. Patricia Gerkin of Greenland, New Hampshire, treats encaustic almost as a medium for the display of artifacts, embedding discrete bits of rusted screen, wire, and hinges in blocks of neutral colored wax. Both the wall pieces and floor sculpture seem to take their concentric form from Roman hippodromes, places of sport and of healing. New England Wax founder Kim Bernard of North Berwick shows a series of classically-inspired geometric abstractions that look almost as though they were done in stucco or plaster as well as a handsome, freestanding sculpture of encaustic, plywood, and lead. That said, Heat Stroke features artists using a wide variety of techniques to produce works of great diversity with the seductive, translucent medium as the unifying element. Frankly, I was most surprised by what these contemporary artists did not do with wax, which is sculpt it in the vein of the lovely wax flowers displayed as an historical adjunct to the show. The exhibitions dominant aesthetic is one of chromatic abstraction punctuated by collaged and buried bits of found imagery. Further, he possesses a knack for instilling that confidence in his best students, inspiring them to dedicate themselves to their talents and to look beyond Maine for an audience and a dialogue.Encaustic is a beeswax-based painting medium that produces work with appealing depth, density, and texture as artists paint with it in its molten state, embed objects in it, and scrape and carve it once it has hardened. Something about his personal investment in the life of art communicates a sense of confidence that art is vital. Juris Ubans is a cultured man, visually literate not only as a painter but also as a photographer and filmmaker. His influence, however, has been more important than the art he has created or collected. Among the name artists Ubans has collected are photographers Berenice Abbott, Eugene Atget, and glass master Dale Chihuly. The exhibition features 150 works by 60 artists. Ubans’s own expressionist paintings form the nucleus of what is essentially a salon show with Ubans as the common denominator. He studied at Syracuse University, Yale, and Penn State before coming to Maine. Displaced by World War II, the Ubans family, minus his father, made their way to the United States in 1950. Born in Riga, Latvia, in 1938, Ubans was born to art, the youngest of three sons of Konrads Ubans, one of Latvia’s best-known painters. Juris Ubans came to USM in 1968, when it was still Gorham State Teachers College, and has been a creative life force there ever since.
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