"Season’s End"
Eve Kotyk, "Season’s End," 2007, encaustic on panel, 15.75" X 17.75".
EVE KOTYK, The Muse
McIntyre Gallery, Regina
April 4 to 26, 2008
By Steven Ross Smith
Eve Kotyk began as an abstract painter, under the influence of Otto Rogers and Robert Christie in the University of Saskatchewan Fine Arts program in the late 1980s, but eventually she felt a need to “seek something more human” in her art. Images — trees at first, and more recently people — have emerged, rendered in encaustic on panel. Kotyk enjoys the challenge of heating and blending beeswax and damar resin, then adding oil pigment, preferring to mix her own colours to achieve a softer palette. She feels that the encaustic medium creates a toned-down softness, yet gives luminescence and warmth. She says it creates a distance between the viewer and the subject, yet draws the viewer in. The paintings for this exhibition — in sizes ranging from 2 feet by 18 inches to 4 feet by 3 feet — will include a series of portraits. She’ll also produce new paintings of expressive, even vivacious trees, which she also considers portraits.
Represented by: McIntyre Gallery, Regina
