GALLERY: COASTAL FORESTS

Encaustic paintings inspired by the landscape of the Pacific Northwest. Many are from my Into the Woods series painted for Sidestreet Arts. Please contact me for sales or any questions.

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Field of Silence

Encaustic, India ink, and shellac on cradled birch panel. 12x18 nches. [SOLD}

Nature Does Utter a Peep

Encaustic, India ink, and shellac on cradled birch panel. 20x10 inches. [SOLD}

I Could Very Calmly Go Wild

Encaustic, India ink, and shellac on cradled birch panel. 12x24 inches. [SOLD}

This is All I Have to Tell You

Encaustic, India ink, and shellac on cradled birch panel. 6x12 inches. [SOLD}

The Silence is All There Is

Encaustic, India ink, and shellac on cradled birch panel. 12xc12 inches. [SOLD}

into the woods: collaborations with forests

COINCIDING WITH the six-year anniversary of my arrival in the Pacific Northwest, I began a series of encaustic landscapes as a celebration of the peace and solitude I’ve found among these exquisite giants — fully outside my experience as a mid-Atlantic native. Rededicating my life to making art after decades of making a living has been a journey of discovery and submission to finding the necessary. The titles of the paintings in this series are excerpted from Annie Dillard’s essay “Living Like Weasels,” in which she reminds us that …

[W]e can, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience — even of silence — by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn't “attack” anything; a weasel lives as he’s meant to: yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.

I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasel’s: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.

The process of my paintings is as important to me as the final image. By slowly building layers of translucent beeswax, my goal is to capture the fog rolling through the forest as it blankets the hillside I live on — enveloping and silent. Each tree is individually painted with a mixture of walnut and India ink, then obscured, not just as an illusion of depth, but creating physical depth in the wax.

Many of these paintings were included in the June 2019 Feature Gallery at Sidestreet Arts. Paired with turned wood objects by Northwest master craftsman Kevin Poest, and found-wood assemblages by Minal Mistry the show was a love letter to the exquisite native woods of the Pacific Northwest.

Michele Sabatier
June, 2019