Inspiration from other artists and new jewelry pieces

 I've started following the work of several artists, whose freedom of expression and use of media I find genuinely amazing and look for inspiration in. I notice that beeswax is becoming more and more prevalent in art--a good thing, since we have four little hives here, rocking the beeswax production. Truthfully, I've been fascinated with encaustic painting since I saw the works of Anselm Kiefer in college in the 1990s. Encaustic, of course, mixes pigments with hot wax, that can either allow for dreamy, veiled washes that make underlying imagery less vivid and more haunting, or allow for the sculptural shaping of the painted surface. Of course, I imagine, one would have to work quickly before the wax set, particularly if you only apply a thin scrim of wax. I plan to experiment with this in 2013. Details will follow in a future post. Below are some images of my latest inspirations and some new works.....

Artist and Jewelry-maker Angela Petsis makes both beautiful earrings
and necklaces as well as lovely paintings, both mixed media and encaustic.
You can see her jewelry store here.  Above is the encaustic painting,
"The Thing About Bees" (2012). There is a beautiful, haunting quality
to her all her work, but this one in particular speaks to me with its lace, its
vintage book imagery, the reference to correspondence with the veiled
longhand letter beneath the skep, the all-seeing eye that appears above.

Artist Patti Roberts-Pizzuto lives is South Dakota and is the proprietor of
both Missouri Bend Studio and Missouri Bend Musings on Etsy. She often uses
t-bags as medium, dipping them in beeswax or stitching them to handmade paper
with embroidery thread. She says that embroidery is simply another form of drawing.
I agree. I love the beauty of her free-form explorations (at Missouri Bend Studios)
and daily drawings (in the shop Missouri Bend Musings). 

Flavia Marele and Ildiko Muresan are the artists behind the fantastic
DoubleFox Studio. I admire their colors, the sense of freedom of their work.
They also mix their own clay, on which they draw (like the example above)
You can purchase the necklace pictured above here. 

I've started making my own series of painted and beaded necklaces.
Above is "Happy Blue Sky" with a miniature painting that can be worn
thanks to two strands of fire polished silver-clear glass beads and
sterling clasps. You can see this listing here. 

"Mr. Blue Sky II" art jewelry necklace, featuring a
miniature painting, and two double strands of blue
luster Indian seed and bugle beads.
You can see the actual shop listing here. 

The radium girls graphic novel continues. Above is the page I am currently inking. The photograph
here, taken with my camera phone in the evening hours, is pretty terrible, but a proper scanned image
will appear in a future post when the page is fully inked!  You can see more of the project here:
www.savannahschrollguz.com/radiumgirlsgraphicnovel.html