About
Cosmic and Close, mixed media encaustic, 36” x 36” x 2”
BIOGRAPHY OF CARYL GORDON
Caryl Gordon is a contemporary artist. She keeps a large studio 10 minutes away from her home where she paints mixed media abstract encaustics.
Growing up in Short Hills, New Jersey, she was only a short commute from New York City. At 16 years of age, she attended life drawing classes at the Art Student’s League in Manhattan on Saturdays.
After one year at Connecticut College, craving more of an art education, she was accepted at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, more commonly known as the Boston Museum School. Drawn back to New York and it’s exciting culture, Gordon matriculated at the Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture receiving a full scholarship and a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in 1975.
During and after having four children, Gordon had a freelance photography business, sharpening her composition skills. At age 40, she relocated to Plano, Texas near Dallas where she was gifted a 2,000 pound etching press.
The next 15 years were spent in her garage making monoprints. Along the way, her prints were juried into shows across the United States in museums, galleries and universities.
Printing led to her current medium, painting with encaustic. This new medium(actually an ancient process going back to the Greeks and Romans) became a passion.
Gordon is represented by the Sweet Art Gallery in Naples, Florida. Gordon has shown her work in art fairs in New York, Miami and San Francisco.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
Life is having knowledge and experience while allowing the unpredictable to reveal itself. I follow this uncertain path when surprises arise in my paintings, often leading to new ideas and new approaches in what I create.
Borrowing from the techniques and processes I discovered in my previous 15 year adventure in printmaking, I now explore the medium of mixed media encaustic. I work with many layers and use different viscosities of wax - two of the ways making monoprints influences my painting; other influences include trial and error, action and reaction.
Combinations of geometric shapes and organic elements often result in aerial view abstract landscapes. When looking down from an airplane, I see man-made buildings, bridges, roads, etc. These translate into geometrics. Mother nature’s mountains, rivers, hills and valleys manifest as organics.
Sometimes I experience the geometrics as drum beats or heart beats, interrupting the flow of music. I am not rhythmic on the outside, but inside I am stomping and swaying to an invisible rhythm that emerges in my work.
I aspire to imagination, rhythm, emotional strength and drama in my mixed media encaustics, whether landscapes, dreamscapes or memoryscapes.
