Barbara Ellmann

Market Place
encaustic on 9 wooden panels
37 x 37 in.

The encaustic game board painting is based on parcheesi, the ancient Indian game. The object of parcheesi is to journey all of your pieces around the perimeter step by step and enter the center space called Home first. A quest to get home. The paintings can suggest the disparate fragments of a whole life, yet project the linear clarity of a map, with a grid and four corners. The parcheesi board resembles the Buddhist yantra, a mandala-like devotional object. My board makes a centering geometry of meditation and practice.

© Barbara Ellmann