Belonging, No.249, 48x36, oil and encaustic on panel





The Calm, 40x30, oil and encaustic on panel





On a Good Day, 40x30, oil and encaustic on panel





Blue Marsh, 36x48, oil and encaustic on panel





Luminus Reflection, 32x36, oil and encaustic on panel





The Journey Home, 28x36, oil and encaustic on panel





Paradise, 24x24, oil and encaustic on panel





Phosphorus Glow, 24x24, oil and encaustic on panel





River Deep, 12x12, oil and encaustic on panel





Lift, 12x12, oil and encaustic on panel





A Day Within a Day, 12x12, oil and encaustic on panel





Peace, 12x12, oil and encaustic on panel





Changing Seasons 1, 9x7, oil and encaustic on panel





Changing Seasons 2, 9x7, oil and encaustic on panel





Changing Seasons 5, 9x7, oil and encaustic on panel





Changing Seasons 2c5, 7x5, oil and encaustic on panel





Changing Seasons 2c4, 7x5, oil and encaustic on panel





Birch Trees, 7x5, oil and encaustic on panel





Trees in the Mist, 5x7, oil and encaustic on panel

Paula Blackwell: Mystery and Materiality By Dan Addington Published in the Winter 2020 issue of Encaustic Arts Magazine Artists are often closely identified with their materials, and the question of why an artist chooses a specific medium is often investigated and can be endlessly debated. Sometimes, the choice is made for purely logistical reasons. A painter might choose water-based materials because of a sensitivity to solvents, or even the mere ease of handling and cleanup. Others might choose oils because of the specific qualities of the paint - Its translucency or viscosity. Artists can spend years moving from medium to medium, experimenting until they find a material that somehow best suites the subject they want to depict. Occasionally, though, an artist can feel inexplicably drawn to a specific material or process that, from a practical point of view, makes little sense. The choice of subject matter might seem beside the point. The process may appear cumbersome and the materials unwieldily. Yet, the artist feels the call of that material. Van Gogh had a love affair with oil paint and coaxed it to do things never before witnessed, ingesting it in the process! Michelangelo often talked of his deep love of marble, famously believing that "the answer" could be found inside these mammoth, rough-hewed blocks. On paper, the choice of a difficult medium might make little sense. None the less, the artist feels called upon to work in that medium, sometimes claiming that "I didn’t choose the medium - it chose me." Such is the case with Portland-based artist Paula Blackwell. Blackwell's evocative landscapes are created with encaustic painting, a process that traces its roots back to antiquity. It involves the act of heating wax to its melting point, adding ingredients like resin to increase the strength of the wax and a variety of pigment types to develop color. It is a physically demanding medium. Not easy to learn, and not easy to control. As a medium that has experienced a popular rebirth in the last 20 years, it is still not as widely taught in academia as other more commonly used mediums like oils, acrylics, or watercolor. It could be argued that, for this reason, a unique culture of workshop education has arisen around this medium. Since this practice was not commonly found in academia in the last couple decades, artists desiring to learn about encaustic's unique properties turned to workshops taught by some who first adopted the medium in the early part of the 21st century. Many artists took these workshops, and in turn began to teach their own workshops. A phenomenon of entrepreneurial education was born, and continues to thrive, so much so that today, artists using the medium of encaustic are encountered much more frequently than before, and their numbers continue to proliferate. It was in the midst of this expansion, almost exactly a decade ago, that Blackwell nearly stumbled upon the medium, and heard its call for the first time. Blackwell, at the time, had no intention of pursuing fine art and painting as a profession, although she was certainly not a..stranger to color and a brush. She had been successfully growing her own business as a faux finish painter and muralist for ten years and had seen much success in that field. Blackwell was a member and vice president of a professional guild of interior muralists. She was in deep. Then came the financial crisis of 2008 and the collapse of the housing market. Blackwell's business began to feel the ramifications of the market, and she began looking for another way to use her formidable knowledge. Blackwell decided to investigate the possibility of teaching, and so she set out to see how other artisans structured their teaching studios and methods. As she looked around and toured various workshops, she began to notice the proliferation of encaustic workshops, and she began to get curious. What was happening here? What was the draw of the encaustic processes she was seeing all around her? Blackwell approached an acquaintance who worked in the medium, finally sitting in with her for a day in hers studio. And that first piece she made with her friend looking on was in essence her answer to the call of the medium. That first painting expressed some truth that she recognized, and as she says "I never turned back". Blackwell began to marry her business acumen to the enthusiasm she was experiencing for the new medium, and connections, exhibitions, and sales soon began to follow. Today Backwell's art can be found in public and private collections, and her work is currently represented in the Art in the Embassies program. Almost immediately upon her adoption of this new medium, Blackwell understood what her subject was. Blackwell has long been a lover of the outdoors, spending time as a child hiking, camping, and exploring in the rugged windswept California coastal landscape from Monterey to Sausalito. For her, the draw was always about the mystery of the path - finding out what was just over the rise, or around the bend. Blackwell traces her belief in the sacred qualities of the landscape back to her grandparents, who taught her their spiritual values: beauty equated with goodness, and when one held nature in reverence and understood its beauty, it in turn surrounded one with goodness and joy. Blackwell speculates that their understanding of nature can be traced to her grandfather, a quiet man of Native American heritage, and her grandmother, who filtered his veneration of nature through her own lens of Christian spiritualism. When Blackwell encountered art in her life, whether in museums or in peoples homes, it was the landscape paintings that captured her attention. To this day, she says that when she views a painting from the renaissance, she tends to look past the figures and primary subject of the scene, fully engaged instead by the landscape in the background. These settings are often rendered in sfumato, a technique perfected by Leonardo that softened the contours of distant backgrounds, mimicking the out-of-focus effect of the human eye perceiving distant vistas and creating an illusion of deep space on a flat surface. When listening to Blackwell talk about her love of hiking and the reverie she felt experiencing the mystery of what is yet to come and waiting for the next discovery on the trail, one can't help but understand why the hazy haunting backgrounds in those renaissance paintings were so influential on her. Blackwell's other grandfather not only worked with guilding, decorative finishing, and art and antique restoration, but he was a collector of paintings from the Hudson River School. As a child, Blackwell recalls viewing paintings by the likes of Frederich Church, Thomas Cole, and George Innes intimately for long periods of time - staring into their mysterious depths, trying to see deeper into those summoning spaces. And this is our experience when we encounter a Blackwell. If you are looking for answers, you'll not find them here. But you will find the beauty of the question, the significance of subtlety, the value of mystery. Intuitively, Blackwell realized early on that the medium of wax had the potential to evoke space in a unique way, unlike other materials. The waxy translucency of the medium can act both as portal and a veil, allowing us to see into the painting, yet obscuring the details and thwarting the desire for definition. In her paintings, Blackwell exploits the atmospheric effect resulting from the layering of wax, resin, and color, inviting us to literally look into the painting, not just at it. Blackwell's paintings are chromatically reserved. Working with a limited palette, the artist uses very subtle shifts in color to suggest atmospheric changes above an often obscured horizon. The outer edges of the painting can be framed in flora, or can merely fade to a darker value, with a suggestion of light source emitting from within the composition. The chiaroscuro of renaissance masters is put to use in these paintings, drawing the viewer into a vortex of glowing space, evoking a light both natural and spiritual, both literal and symbolic. Exploiting the atmospheric translucencies of beeswax, Blackwell's landscape paintings guide us through scenes that owe more to her own psychological makeup than to any actual earthly location. One would be hard pressed to identify a specific species of tree, or any landmark of mountain or lake in these paintings. Instead, Blackwell is rendering an internal view of a psychological space pregnant with mystery and longing. This is universal territory, and we are all invited to explore it. In her trajectory towards the realization of her artistic identity, Blackwell has indeed followed her own winding path, led by the call of the medium she found along the way. She has traveled far from her practice of decorating interior spaces, to her rendering of the exterior landscape, and finally calling upon these images of the land to render what is truly internal. Blackwell's work expresses a longing for beauty, joy, and goodness, and evokes the mysterious path we all must follow to find them. _____________________________ Dan Addington is an artist, curator, and gallerist. His figurative paintings, rendered in tactile and evocative materials such as wax and tar, explore ideas about memory, history, and the passage of time. Exhibited widely, his work is represented in numerous public and private collections. Addington has served as visiting artist, exhibition juror, curator, and workshop instructor for art centers, museums, and colleges throughout the United States. He is the owner and director of Addington Gallery, Chicago. "Anchors for the Ether: Paula Blackwell's Spiritual Landscapes" By Richard Speer, copyright 2021 It is impossible to describe the subject matter and settings of Paula Blackwell's landscape paintings without using words that conjure drama and romance: "haunting," "sylvan," "glen," "gorge," "ethereal," perhaps even "Wagnerian." Her encaustic and oil paintings on cradled wood panel transport us to realms we cannot quite place, though they seem to materialize fully formed out of our collective memory. Their "air of mystery and timelessness," as arts writer Veronica Russell describes their allure, lends "a curious sense of familiarity: Where have I seen this, in a dream? An old movie?" Although the painter hails from the foggy shores of Pacifica, California, just south of San Francisco, and currently lives only 25 miles from the majestic Columbia River Gorge, her towering vistas do not scream "Northern California" or "Pacific Northwest," rather, they whisper of terrains of the mind, in-between zones midway between waking life and dreams. Nature envelops Blackwell on the grounds of her sprawling 1970s ranch house in the countryside near Oregon City. Each morning on the patio outside her studio she writes in her journal, with horses and cows lolling about in adjacent pastures and visitations by deer, chipmunks, honeybees, and hummingbirds. Scents of cyprus, cedar, redwood, and maple mingle with lavender, marigold, and hydrangea. It is an aptly Edenic spot for the birthing of her paeans to organic beauty, especially given her heightened sensitivity to the physical world as a former athlete, lifelong hiker and camper, and now as an artist who paints with the elements themselves: fire, beeswax, and the ground-up minerals we call pigment. It is noteworthy that an artist so engaged with nature arrived at the fine arts by way of the decorative arts, with its lineage spanning the fog-shrouded mountainscape screens of dynastic China through the abstracted woodlands and primrose gardens of Art Nouveau. For many years her specialty was faux-finish painting, itself derived from the illusionism of trompe-loeil. Blackwell brings a varied background and a tenacious, upbeat character to her aesthetic pursuits. Prior to becoming a full-time artist, she did everything from assembling semiconductors in Silicon Valley to becoming involved in the San Francisco music scene to founding her own business in Portland, Oregon. A pivotal development, which channeled her toward the visual arts, was beholding the faux-finishing work done on her mother- and father-in-law's home in preparation for the 1990 San Francisco Decorator Showcase. An important 1919 Beaux-Arts mansion designed by architect George Applegarth and overlooking the Presidio and Golden Gate Bridge, it was a sumptuous but fusty abode until master craftspeople and artisans updated every square inch of its 6,100 square feet, replacing dated wallpapers and fixtures with painstaking terra-cotta ornamentation, Italian milk-glass chandeliers, and frescoes spilling over with cherubs and statuary, fruit baskets and flowers. (Two years later, the home was featured in the Michael Douglas/Sharon Stone film Basic Instinct.) Blackwell was deeply impressed by this transformation, especially the ways in which illusionism can recontextualize space and scale: "It was magical," she recalls today. "After seeing that, my inner artist was ignited." (pictured on left: The Calm, Paula Blackwell, encaustic, 40x30, 2021) When she moved to Oregon in 2000 she learned the ins and outs of this ancient art, became a licensed contractor, and in 2005 started a successful faux-finishing business, Faux du Jour. Eventually the firm was chosen to work with designers in the Northwest Natural Street of Dreams, the Portland equivalent of the San Francisco Designer Showcase, bringing her passion for the decorative arts full circle. A restless creative spirit loath to rest on laurels, she moved on to a new fascination in 2010, one that would prove fortuitous: encaustic painting. After encountering encaustic art and artists during the annual Portland Open Studios walking tour, she tried her hand at it with the help of a fellow encaustic painter and found she had a natural affinity. "Intuitively." gallerist Dan Addington has written, "Blackwell realized that the medium of wax had the potential to evoke space uniquely, unlike other materials. The waxy translucency of the medium can act both as a portal and a veil, allowing us to see into the painting, yet obscuring the details and thwarting the desire for definition." Gripped by the medium's promise and her innate ability to finesse it, she converted her garage into a studio, set up a ventilation system, and painted day and night. Collectors took notice of this gifted newcomer, and her work became very popular very quickly. Only a month after having established her home studio she joined the stable of Z Galleries and sold 25 paintings in one week through One Kings Lane, the New York-based luxury home decor and furnishings store, including three to actress Jessica Biel. Her works have subsequently been featured in film and television productions and now hang in the U.S. embassies in The Vatican and The Republic of Latvia. The multi-step process that produces these moodily, broodingly beautiful artworks is a transubstantiation of beeswax, water-soluble oil paints, and pigmented oil sticks, overlaid in as many as five layers. Often she distresses surfaces using rocks, old keys, razor blades, dental instruments, pottery tools, scrapers, spatulas, and a rotary tracing wheel from her grandmother's old sewing box. These tools impart the appearance of oxidation, use, and age. Backwell begins with gloved hands, liquefied beeswax, dammar resin, and pigment, coaxing the putty-like admixture into evocative forms and miasmas on the wood panel. Next, out comes the blowtorch as she singes the surface, fusing wax and pigments together, a technique that requires an exceptionally delicate touch, for too much contact with the flame can ruin a carefully planned composition. She tends to paint from the sides of the picture plane inward toward the white space in the center, effecting a lightness and pellucidity that complement rich contrasts of light and dark, delicate sfumato, and glistening brushwork, which imparts texturality and sheen to tree leaves and sunlight glinting off water. In the midst of the making, not everything goes perfectly every time. "I am in a struggle with the paint," she reflects. "Sometimes it's a battle. I'm trying to accomplish something, and it either works out or it doesn't. I always have the option to smear it away. Sometimes when I smear it, it looks better! But you battle it out, and whatever happens, happens." (pictured on right: Out of the Blue, Paula Blackwell, encaustic, 40x30, 2021) Her imagery encompasses not only her signature fjords, gorges, and ravines (as in The Valley Expiration and The Calm), but also skyscapes in which land is only hinted at (as in Out of the Blue and The Escape), as well as pure abstractions, which she describes as "lyrical and metaphorical, expressing beauty and emotion in a more imaginative, avant-garde way - engaging the eye with a more complex and playful fusion of color, shape and atmosphere." Across this broad range of expression, her imagery steers us toward the transcendental, the mystical, the connective fibers between the personal and the cosmic. She has referred to her paintings as "spiritual landscapes," and the phrase rings true. In the potent distillations of the earth's grandeur she aims to lift our gazes from the quotidian into the sublime. This may explain why her paintings are suffused with the sensation of floating, of hovering above rocks, trees, and lapping waves like a consciousness without a body. Indeed, there are no bodies, no traces of human habitation in these idylls. Whatever humanity they communicate is inferred or invited, for they do beckon us to project ourselves into their untrodden expanses. While the works have inevitably drawn comparisons to historical paintings of the Old Dutch Masters, J.M.W. Turner, and the Hudson River School, Blackwell's closest correlate in contemporary art is probably the Nagasaki-born painter Hiro Yokose, renowned for his dreamily calmative pastorales. Nature, as Blackwell conceives it, is a conduit toward reflection and inner peace, offering everything from simple escapism from the exhaustions of urban life to spiritual edification of the highest order. In her vision, landscape promises rejuvenation and the possibility of epiphany. The columnar light emanating from the centers of works such as Worlds Beyond and Deep into the Mist, often cradled within the cleavage of a chasm’s opposing slopes, is dually meteorological and metaphysical. Atmosphere and light allude to an impending encounter with the preternatural. Those tilting slopes, and the woodlands and waterways they plunge into, ground us in the face of unspeakable numinous forces. They are anchors for the ether: vanishing points where matter dematerializes, one-point perspective ends, and realms of enigma and wonderment commence. Richard Speer is a critic, author, and curator based in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A. His essays and reviews have appeared in ARTnews, ArtPulse, Art Papers, Visual Art Source, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Oregonian, Salon, and Newsweek. He is the author of "The Space of Effusion: Sam Francis in Japan" (Scheidegger & Spiess, 2020) and co-curator of the exhibition "Sam Francis and Japan: Emptiness Overflowing" (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2023). For more information, please visit www.richardspeer.com.