Category: Encaustic

Finished art, painted with heated wax and other multi-media.

First Station: Jesus is condemned to death

3″ x 3″ on wallboard

I’ve decided that my Lenten observance this year will be encaustic paintings of the Stations of the Cross. Every Friday I will post a piece I started at the beginning of the week, contemplating on the Mystery. These will be WIPs that I will continue to develop throughout Lent. On Good Friday I’ll post an update on where the pieces finished.

Or, at least, that’s the plan now, at the beginning of Lent. Sometimes (well, every year, actually) what I think Lent will be and what Lent ends up being are different things.

Ash Wednesday, 2022

This is a WIP, a devotional of Our Lady using rose petals surrounding a high school portrait of my mother. (The great artists all portrayed Mary as the most beautiful woman they could imagine, so I’m allowed to use Mom.) In the spirit of the beginning of Lent, this piece is unfinished. In Holy Week I’ll post the update and we’ll see where the journey took me.

Farewell to Gazes

6″ x 6″ on wallboard

My beloved main toon on the PS EU server, Gazes-at-Shoes, is retiring. Because of technical issues, I no longer play The Elder Scrolls Online on PlayStation, only on PC. She looks somewhat fierce here, but she was always a sweetheart and a joy to game. My new toon wouldn’t be half as fun if I hadn’t learned it all first with Gazes.

No Bonnie waits to take my toy. The digital world, imbued with just as many tea parties and heroic adventures as Andy’s room, isn’t suited for introducing a plaything to the next generation. My first Barbie doll in the early 1970s would look, except for cosmetic differences, like a Barbie of today. Gaming moves too fast, though, for that. Not only do hardware and programming advance, but human reflexes and multi-tasking abilities become more sophisticated. I like the next shiny as much as anyone. Therefore, my girl is gone, an old file in a junked console. The friends I made through her, real people inhabiting a virtual screen, are left behind, too.

Lol, well, this turned into more of an elegy than I expected! Gazes lives in the cloud, so any time I renew my subscriptions and find a PlayStation with the proper software, I can see her again. It won’t happen, though. I’ve moved on.