Eileen Goldenberg

Blue Fence #10
encaustic on wood
12 x 12 in.

The imagery in my paintings rises from my memories of emotional landmarks, events and people that have come and gone. I work intuitively and in series, each painting leading me to the next. Small marks, circles, and lines, mark the moments, joy and loss. Windows give a peek inside.

One of the aspects of my paintings is the emotiomuscular physicality of scraping down through layers of the encaustic wax. It is a cathartic excavation of hidden, previously laid down imagery. I am creating movement and feeling through the integration of diaphanous apertures, surface texture, and color. The translucent properties of the wax allows for the many strata to be perceived.progression.

The “Underworld” series expresses levels of emotion: under, over, sometimes floating up and through. It is the visual equivalent of the natural world, an emotional landscape.

The “Untitled” series uses a variety of marks, in loose grids, forming a comforting structure. I don’t measure or try for “perfect” alignment, instead I let my hand go where she will go. This unconciousness is important to reveal the pure form of expressing feelings. There are architectural references that evoke structure, home and retrospection. The use of color is indicitive of visceral evidence.

For the past 25 years, my main focus has been as a ceramic artist. I create a line of functional table ware as well as a gallery collection of larger sculptural work. The shift to paintings doesn’t waver from my vision. They are all related: surface texture, windows, and the graphic use of lines and marks. Of the various mediums in which I work, they all have a continuity that connects them in a logical progression.

© Eileen Goldenberg