Judy Arsenault, also exhibiting at Secord Gallery, takes a viewer back into winter with her contemplative, texturally exciting, encaustic paintings of birch trees as carved vertical forms in a snowy wood.
Arsenault carves into a wax that is slightly pitted and very alive; she also spatters on delicate spots of colour and snowflakes and vague forms of birds. Two of her works include wood panels of photo transfers of ghostly birds, set amidst the panels of white snowy wax.
Like Adams, she also uses text and her subject is nature. She has an obvious love for materials and they connect well to her subject matter.
As she says, “the various stages of encaustic work mimic the great processes of the development of our natural world.”
Arsenault, inspired by the view from her Maitland studio, also exhibits abstracted, acrylic landscape paintings in vivid colour like the eye-popping Study for Autumn Tide in gold, orange and purple.
Summertime Garden, of encaustic on birch, combines the punchy colour of the acrylics with the blurred film of wax.