Charli Ornett

Bio: Drawing from the tradition of modern abstract painting my work explores the tension between the definite and the amorphous, that place where a hard edge or line meets the soft and yielding.

In both art and life I think this border between land and sky, sleeping and waking, curiosity and certainty, is where we are most alive and can see most clearly.

Working with molten wax and pigment I build up layers and textures then scrape the cooled paint back to reveal the hidden history of place and form. By layering translucent tints over opaque my process draws the gaze into the depths of the painting, allowing it to become a window to an inner landscape.

I have been painting with encaustic since 2001. Paintings are in private collections in California, New York, Washington DC, and Rome, Italy as well as in the institutional collection of Cisco Systems, San Jose, California.

-Charli Ornett encaustic painting