Caryl Gordon
CARYL GORDON — I have been a printmaker for many years making abstract landscape monoprints using found objects and repurposed textures in my compositions. At first, the monoprints were inspired directly from nature and later evolved into nature redefined. I envisioned a world of man-made objects lost in outer space, cyber-space, or just underground, either purposely planted there or merely left behind by modern day civilization.
Exploring the medium of encaustic, I found I could combine my passion for painting, printmaking and collaging using hot wax, cutting up my monoprints and creating fabric designs, implementing found objects as stencils. I adhere these materials with wax into works which sometimes portray images of nature and sometimes portray images of my concept of nature redefined. Interestingly, the pieces representing nature usually have a simplicity, where my redefined pieces show a complexity reminiscent of the machine age or the computer age we are now passing through.
Having grown up in New Jersey, I had easy access to all the wonderful museums in nearby New York City. At 16, I started my art career studying life drawing at the Art Student’s League in Manhattan. In college, I first attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, more commonly known as the Boston Museum School. Returning to New York, I received my BFA from Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture on a full scholarship. As an art student at Cooper Union, I found myself facinated by the work of Romare Bearden and Hans Hoffmann. Bearden’s collaging and Hoffmann’s painting led me to develop what is my most recent work, exciting my senses to color, texture and rhythm. I like to think that my art has a musical quality to it, as if I’m patching together notes in collage or using ethereal sweeps of paint or hot wax with which to sing along.
My monoprints and mixed media encaustics have been shown in galleries, museums and universities across the United States. They have been published in national and international art books and catalogues. I now create in my studio in Plano, Texas. — Caryl C. Gordon
