Do you listen to the dead
Or listen to the living?
Do they both demand of you
To give and keep on giving?Feeding on your every hour
Absorbing all your strength and power
Until the day that you have died
Equally unsatisfied—Yes, you could listen to the dead …
Or, listen to yourself instead.
That’s a little poem I wrote way back in 2017, to accompany this painting, which is currently featured in my show, Medicine of the Forest.
I used a fun medium on this piece which I haven’t dabbled with in a long time … cold wax. It’s a sort of encaustic wax that you don’t have to heat for it to be malleable. I’m not totally clear on the chemistry of how that even works.
This is unfortunately true of a lot of the supplies I work with. I know how to use the materials and make stuff turn out cool but I have little depth to my knowledge of what the actual chemistry is.
Not just how materials function independently, but how they are produced, their impact on water, air, and soil, and how they interact with other materials to create different compounds immediately and over longer periods of time.
It’s a lot to learn and I have found it intimidating. Mainly because it makes me incrementally more aware of how poorly humanity is stewarding our material reality on a systemic level.
Every day I learn a little more though. It’s one of my long term goals: to understand the chemistry of the materials I work with so well that that knowledge itself becomes a core component of the art.
In many ways that has already been the case from the beginning. But there’s a lot of leveling up to do.
Because the times, they are a-changin’.
—Adrien
