Inspired by how we react to our surroundings, mixed-media artist Karen Hubacher recently began considering her own relationship to the Chesapeake Bay. But what began as a small experiment—eight paintings shown this summer at a gallery in Washington, D.C.—gathered momentum in ways the artist never foresaw.
“It has pretty much overtaken my life,” she says with a laugh. “I have now completed 46 paintings in the series!”
Hubacher began her “Chesapeake Journal” with 10″ by 8″ panels that used simple divisions of horizon lines and a palette of colors to evoke the surface and sky of the Chesapeake Bay. Her Eastern Shore home is right on the water, and she travels across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge at least three times a month, so she sees her subject from numerous angles, but the beauty she saw and the inspiration she felt combined to form a simple but profound question: How do you capture that feeling in art?
A period of experimentation led the artist to encaustic, a type of painting that involves adding pigments to heated wax. Before long, Hubacher saw her visions of the Chesapeake vividly reflected before her.
“In working with hot wax, I found the fluid medium conducive to creating textures that became more obviously cloud and water patterns,” she explains. “It became a more direct way of responding to my environment, with the endless subtle and mysterious nuances evident in the changing of the seasons and the time of day.”
Hubacher’s encaustic paintings of the Chesapeake are featured in two shows this holiday season. The first is a year-end group show at Gallery plan b in Washington, D.C., that runs through December 24, 2013. The second is a holiday art show at MassoniArt in Chestertown, Maryland, which runs through December 22, 2013.
At both shows, buyers can immediately take Hubacher’s work home with them, a real draw for the art-loving holiday shopper and a fine way to experience what Hubacher evokes through her Eastern Shore visions: “solitary, contemplative time spent in quiet places.”
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