200º: Encaustic Works by Kim Bernard, Sara Crisp, Tremain Smith & William Thomson

Hippodrome 2007, by artist Kim Bernard features encaustic on plywood and lead

Opening Reception: Friday, September 12, 6:30-8 p.m.
Gallery Talk: Saturday, September 13, 10 a.m.

Exeter, NH (August 26, 2008)—Phillips Exeter Academy’s Lamont Art Gallery will present “200°: Encaustic Works by Kim Bernard, Sara Crisp, Tremain Smith & William Thomson,” from Friday, September 12, to Saturday, October 18, 2008. An opening reception for the exhibit will be held Friday, September 12, 6:30-8 p.m., followed by a gallery talk on Saturday, September 13, at 10 a.m. The Lamont Gallery is in the Frederick R. Mayer Art Center on Tan Lane. The exhibit is free and open to the public.

Encaustic is a process of heating beeswax and adding colored pigments to paint. Kim Bernard is an artist and painter who exhibits her encaustic and sculptural work nationally. The recipient of the National Prize Show Sculpture Award and a 2007 finalist for the Piscataqua Artists Advancement Grant, she earned a bachelor’s degree in 1987 from Parsons School of Design in New York.

Bernard creates encaustic works both two-dimensionally and sculpturally. Her works are described as simultaneously archaic and contemporary, implementing contrasting materials such as wax, lead and ceramic. Bernard teaches at the Maine College of Art and works regionally as a visiting artist. She is a founding member of New England Wax, a professional association of artists doing encaustic work, and has offered numerous presentations on encaustic and sculpture. 

Bernard says her two-dimensional works are “inspired by the Sumi brush paintings of Zen masters. This recent body of two-dimensional encaustic works is an attempt to capture movement:  fluid, gestural, spontaneous, whole body movement, as in a dance.” Her sculptural pieces, she adds, were inspired by a trip to Greece where she studied amphitheater forms.

Lotus, encasutic 2008 by artist Sara Crisp

Sara Crisp earned her undergraduate degree from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Her encaustic works have been presented in several solo exhibitions nationwide, most recently at Denise Bibro Fine Art Gallery in New York; the June Fitzpatrick Gallery in Portland, ME; the Artemisia Gallery in Chicago, IL; and the 1708 Gallery in Richmond, VA. Crisp is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2001 Best of Show Prize at the Cambridge Art Association national prize show.
                                                                           
Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Boston Sunday Globe, Art New England and The Village Voice. This year, she was awarded a fellowship in the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts International Residency Program at Auvillar, France.

Tremain Smith's, Adonai Ha Eretz, was created with oil, wax, collage on panel, 2008

An encaustic artist with four pieces in the permanent collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tremain Smith has work in corporate and private collections throughout the United States. Smith has held solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Scottsdale, Deer Isle, ME, Wilmington, DE and Sarasota, FL. She was awarded an artist residency in 2004 at the McCollCenter for Visual Art in Charlotte, NC. In 2006, she was an instructor in encaustic painting at the Penland School of Crafts in Penland, NC.

Smith has been reviewed extensively, including by The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Chicago Tribune and LA Weekly. Her work is included in The Art of Encaustic Painting: Contemporary Expression in the Ancient Medium of Pigmented Wax, published by Watson-Guptill, and in the art journal New American Paintings. Smith studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Tyler School of Art, Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pennsylvania.

“I use the grid to create order in my work,” Smith explains. “It is the structure that I build upon, layer by layer. From this basis I move freely. It is the departure point from which I start as well as a reference to which I continually return. This structure is a metaphor for me: my core stands intact as I move, grow, and evolve. The lines are bridges or passageways and the planes are entities, representing internal states of being. They become mappings of the unseen as I seek to visually manifest access to the spiritual.”

William Thomson's, Homage to Jasper Johns, encaustic, 2008

During the course of his more than 40-year career, William Thomson has worked in many media, including encaustic oil, alkyd, watercolor, casein, acrylic and egg tempera. Concentrating on paint applications and nuances of color, he creates an array of powerful images, from classical portraits to complex abstracts, from the deeply somber to the cleverly humor.

Thomson studied in Connecticut under Ernst Lohrmann, at the Paier Art School, and at the Meriden Trade School. His solo exhibitions include the Van Ward Gallery in Boston and Oqunquit, ME; the Country Art Gallery and Union College in Long Island, NY; the New Britain Museum of American Art, in New Britain, CT; Main Street Galleries in Chicago, IL; and the Polonaise Art Gallery in Woodstock, VT. Thomson’s works can also be found in the collections of the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Holyoke Museum of Art & History, the Butler Institute, Williams College, DeCordova Museum, Hamlin University and Marietta College in Marietta, OH. He is a winner of the Carolyn Stern Award from the American Watercolor Society; the first-prize winner of the Connecticut Watercolor Society; the Berkshire Art Association’s Burns Award; and the Allied Artists of America’s gold medal in watercolor.

Gallery hours are Monday, 1-5 p.m., and Tuesday – Saturday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. For more information, contact the Lamont Gallery at (603) 777-3461 or visit our Gallery webpage.