"Non finito. We are unfinished works."
MFA thesis project. Encaustic on wood panel,.
October 3-14, 2008, MFA Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal.
Peter Aitkens on unknowning
Encaustic on wood panel, 32" x 40"
2008, Studio 30, St. Henri, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Collection of Jeannie Haggerty and Peter Aitkens
THESE WORKS IN ENCAUSTIC on panel are the product of my engagement with people as individual "unfinished" human beings. It seems we can never be "finished" individuals, as we cannot help but be engaged with one another. It is by way of involvement with humanity; family, friends, and community, etc., that we are made hopeful so as to freely imagine one another as both aesthetic and spiritual beings, including the consequent mutual respect that would imply. In painting, I struggle to present the substance of what is seen and of what is unseen.
MY WORK GIVES ME the chance to engage with others. My subsequent withdrawal to reflection, creates a dynamic of observation between the seen and the unseen; the imagined, the unknown. In this way, there can be a concreteness to imagination, a visualizing of the unseen, a tangible knowledge of, and encounter with, the unknown, touching the other. Painting the human figure helps deliver me from the monastic isolation of art practice. Likewise, the work seeks to engage the viewer beyond the notion of the "psychological portrait" towards a portrait of both flesh and spirit.
Detail of
Peter Aitkens on unknowing
A point on technique:
SINCE THE WORK OF JASPER JOHNS, there has been a growing re-discovery in encaustic painting within contemporary art. The most notable ancient find of encaustic work is the Egyptian portraiture of the dead at Fayum. These were inserted into the form of the body created by the strips of linen burial cloth of mummies around time of the Roman occupation of Egypt from 100 BC to 100 AD.
BY USING ENCAUSTIC and standing in the tradition of figurative painting, I am not alone. Toronto based artist, Tony Scherman, paints figuratively in encaustic, and has work that I find challenging, although both his goals and scale are very different. Whereas Tony uses the idea of forensics to re-create an imaginary past, I work with present personal history to engage "flesh and blood" in the intimacy of personal experience. All of this is to say that the choice of technique is essential to me; the wax, the melting and its application of encaustic, the very materiality of the process, is rightly suited for me to explore the vicissitudes of encounter with "real life" friends and acquaintances who are "both aesthetic and spiritual beings."
