21 Jan 2014
Feature Story: Add Sense of Place
Author: ayshleek@uoregon.edu | Filed under: UncategorizedKatie Drew runs around her kitchen, opening drawers and digging through cupboards. She looks up at me from the silverware drawer to ask how long I think the crayons have been in the oven. I tell her I doubt they are melted yet. She nods and wordlessly continues to fish around for the right fork.
The apartment has a feeling of warmth. The kitchen has marble countertops and shares open space with the nook/dining area and the living room. The honey-colored wood floors give the apartment a sense of foundation and hope. Like a place where things can remain, or a spring board for a new idea to arise. The open-air feeling is facilitated by the floor-to-ceiling windows that make up the wall on the left half of the kitchen. That wall gives way to a small nook, also equipped with floor to ceiling windows. The warm sunshine enters the room through the panes, warming the honey-colored wood I stand on as I gaze out onto the street and across the horizon into downtown Portland. The nook gives way to the patio door, also glass, which stands between me and the flower-potted cement patio. Two green adirondack chairs are perched facing one another and a pair of Katie’s blue Ray-Bans lay on the table. Katie grabs a handful of brushes and takes a left from the kitchen down the hallway, ducking into her bedroom. The tall windows heat the bedroom as the suns rays beg to be let in. A gray Weimaraner lays quietly basking. Sophie, Katie’s pet dog and proclaimed “daughter,” waits for her master to return to her work station — a large art desk set next to the tall windows and covered in waxes and paint.
Encaustic painting is characterized by the use of hot wax on canvas. The use of the wax varies from artist to artist, and different application techniques add a variety of color and texture to the painting. Cold wax pieces can be placed directly on the canvas and melted with a hot encaustic iron. For a different effect, the artist can pour hot wax on the painting, or sprinkle it on with a utensil. This must be done quickly as the wax cools and hardens in a hurry.
Today, Ms. Drew uses a combination of both of these techniques, combined with acrylic paint and pastels. Her client has asked for a large canvas painting of a pigeon. Katie shares that she is struggling with painting the pigeon the way the client has asked for it- in black and white. Today marks her sixth attempt at the pigeon. Katie’s boyfriend and patient consultant, Marcus, volunteers that he isn’t sure what was wrong with the last five, and shrugs his shoulders in surrender as Katie describes her disdain for them. “It’s so hard to just paint a pigeon. I mean I get it, it’s a New Yorker thing, they have a thing for pigeons…but that’s all he wants, just a pigeon on this huge canvas.” She pauses. “I feel like it needs something else.”
Katie’s bedroom doubles as an art studio and workspace with her queen size bed pushed into a corner to allow for maximum painting space. Her floor-to-ceiling windows flood the room with sunlight on this summer day. She sets the canvas upright on the painting desk and examines it. At the moment the canvas is white, with glimpses of color peaking through from beneath, painted over from her last five attempts.
She plugs in her encaustic iron and sets it on a tin plate facing up. Steam begins to rise, adding a mysterious ambience to her otherwise cool and bright bedroom. She places some clear, flat, hardened wax pieces directly on the canvas. When the iron is hot enough, she rests it on the pieces. We quietly watch them pool into a liquid. She smears the newly melted wax across the canvas. Now she moves the iron over the acrylic covered canvas, and melts the paint away in the outline of a pigeon. I reel. A second ago the canvas was more or less one-dimensional. Within a few seconds a pigeon emerges, and the canvas is a three-dimensional terrain.
I remind her the crayons are probably done, and we rush back into the kitchen. She puts on her oven mitt and retrieves the cupcake tin, each cup a liquid bright Crayola color. It looks like a child’s dream. She grabs a spoon and we hurriedly walk back into her bedroom where she spoons the hot melted rainbow onto sporadic areas of the pigeon.
Katie Drew is a professional financial advisor at Merrill Lynch in Portland, Ore. She has a Master’s Degree in Business Administration, which she claims“is for practical purposes, and has really come in handy.” What really makes her heart tick is her encaustic painting, a technique she mastered while completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Oregon. She sits on the Young Patrons Board for the Portland Art Museum, and when she’s not helping individuals and small businesses manage their money or prepare for retirement, she’s planning events at the Art Museum, and hanging out at the Yacht Club, where she’s learning to sail.
“After my knee surgery, I had to find a hobby that didn’t have such tough physicality requirements,” said Drew, who just finished her most recent marathon in October. “The yacht club helps fill the void that I have after having to give up long distance running. It’s funny,” she remarks in our conversation over melted wax and acrylic, a member said to me the other day: “‘you financial planners and your art.’” She looked up at me. I told him, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Art is what I do. Financial planning is how I get by.”
Katie steps away from her painting, which at this point has all the indelible features and characteristics of a New York pigeon-whatever that means. The colorful piece has no resemblance to the black and white palette her client suggested. “I like it,” she says. I smile and snap a photo.Just another day at the House of Drew.
Tags: art, encaustic painting, feature story, ore, portland, Sense of Place, wax, weimaraner
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