Betsy Eby | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Elizabeth Kerry Eby April 3, 1967 Seaside, Oregon, United States |
| Education | University of Oregon |
| Known for | Encaustic painting |
Betsy Eby (born April 3, 1967) is an American artist and musician known for her abstract encaustic paintings. Eby lives and works in Columbus, Georgia, and Wheaton Island, Maine. [1]
Eby was born April 3, 1967, in Seaside, Oregon. In 1972, her family moved to the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. Her father worked in the timber industry, and her mother worked in community college admissions. [2] At the age of five, Eby began playing the piano and learned the traditional classical repertoire. [3] She continues to study seriously under master musicians. [4]
Eby earned her bachelor's degree in art history at the University of Oregon, with an emphasis in ancient Greek, Roman and Asian antiquities. [5] In 1990 she moved to Seattle, Washington, where she lived and worked until 2013, when she and her husband, American artist Bo Bartlett, moved to Columbus, Georgia. They now share their time between Columbus, Georgia and Wheaton Island, Maine. In 2018, Eby and Bartlett opened the Bo Bartlett Center at Columbus State University, an interactive gallery space designed to engage nearby communities through arts programming. [6]
Betsy Eby works primarily in encaustic, a painting medium of hot beeswax, damar resin, and pigments. The encaustic technique dates back to the 4th century B.C., when it was originally used for Egyptian mummy funerary portraits. Encaustic was not a common medium for painters until its revival by the Pop artist, Jasper Johns, in his iconic flag paintings. [7]
Eby uses a technique of layering and spreading pigmented wax over her canvas using brushes and knives. [8] She liquefies the wax with a blowtorch and the layers are fused, resulting in the illusion of surface depth and translucency. This illusion is heightened by Eby's use of impasto on the surface of her canvases. [9]
Her work expresses atmosphere and motion in a style Eby has referred to as “lyrical abstraction.” [10] An accomplished classical pianist, music bears a prominent influence in her artworks, which are often inspired by and titled after pieces of classical and contemporary music [9] by composers such as John Cage, Alan Hovhaness, Johannes Brahms and Claude Debussy. [11] [12]
Eby's native Pacific Northwest inspires her misty palette and foggy, blurred edges, while her study of Japanese art lends restraint and intentionality to her practice. [4] Early influences on her work include Morris Graves and Mark Tobey, among a group of artists known as the Northwest Mystics, known for their muted colors and economy of brush. [13] Since moving to Georgia, Eby has explored the richness of the light and an expanded color palette. [2]
Eby is guided by the idea that “the health of our environment is a mirror to the health of our collective conscience.” [14] In the South, Eby is keenly aware of the edges defined by the cultural tension of competing beliefs related to race, religion, and politics. [2] She finds parallels between this cultural tension and the natural environment during her studies of nature in Maine, where changes in weather can be sudden and severe. [14] In 2018 Betsy Eby was to chosen to represent the United States as a Cultural Exchange Artist through the U.S. State Department's Art in Embassies program in Papua New Guinea and The Solomon Islands. As a cultural exchange artist, Eby aimed to promote a message of female empowerment through creativity, through working with local artists, and participating in television and radio interviews. [15] [16]
Betsy Eby is also a film producer and musician for film. [17] In 2013, she and Bo Bartlett released the feature-length documentary film SEE, An Art Road Trip. [18] In 2019, she was executive producer and musician for the feature-length film Things Don’t Stay Fixed, the documentary short film Helga, and the documentary Lobster Dinner. [17]
Betsy Eby has exhibited widely across the United States. Her 2013 solo exhibition, “Painting with Fire,” traveled to the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, GA; the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, GA; the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport, ME; and the Ogden Museum in New Orleans, LA. Eby's works are held in the collections of the Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA, the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, GA, the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA, and several United States Embassies around the world. [1]
Encaustic painting, also known as hot wax painting, is a form of painting that involves a heated wax medium to which colored pigments have been added. The molten mix is applied to a surface—usually prepared wood, though canvas and other materials are sometimes used. The simplest encaustic medium could be made by adding pigments to wax, though recipes most commonly consist of beeswax and damar resin, potentially with other ingredients. For pigmentation, dried powdered pigments can be used, though some artists use pigmented wax, inks, oil paints or other forms of pigmentation.
Columbus is a consolidated city-county located on the west-central border of the U.S. state of Georgia. Columbus lies on the Chattahoochee River directly across from Phenix City, Alabama. It is the county seat of Muscogee County, with which it officially merged in 1970. Columbus is the second-largest city in Georgia, and fields the state's fourth-largest metropolitan area. At the 2020 census, Columbus had a population of 206,922, with 328,883 in the Columbus metropolitan area. The metro area joins the nearby Alabama cities of Auburn and Opelika to form the Columbus–Auburn–Opelika Combined Statistical Area, which had an estimated population of 486,645 in 2019.
Andrew Newell Wyeth was an American visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century.
Sister Gertrude Morgan was a self-taught African-American artist, musician, poet and preacher. Born in LaFayette, Alabama, she relocated to New Orleans in 1939, where she lived and worked until her death in 1980. Sister Morgan achieved critical acclaim during her lifetime for her folk art paintings. Her work has been included in many groundbreaking exhibitions of visionary and folk art from the 1970s onwards.
Ginny Ruffner is a pioneering American glass artist based in Seattle, Washington. She is known for her use of the lampworking technique and for her use of borosilicate glass in her painted glass sculptures.
Karl Zerbe was a German-born American painter and educator.
Amelia Alcock-White is a Canadian artist based in Vancouver.
Jennifer Bartlett was an American artist. She was known for paintings and prints that combine the system-based aesthetic of conceptual art with the painterly approach of Neo-Expressionism. Many of her pieces were executed on small, square, enamel-coated steel plates that are combined in grid formations to create very large works.
Bo Bartlett is an American Realist painter working in Columbus, Georgia and Wheaton Island, Maine.
Amy Pleasant is an American painter living and working in Birmingham, AL.
Steffen Wolfgang George Thomas was an artist and poet. He was born in Fürth, Germany, but lived most of his adult life in Atlanta, Georgia. His most notable pieces are public monuments; however, he also worked in other media. His art is greatly influenced by Expressionism.
Laylah Ali (born 1968) is a contemporary visual artist known for paintings in which ambiguous race relations are depicted with a graphic clarity and cartoon strip format.
Soichi Sunami was a Japanese and American modernist photographer, influenced by the pictorialist movement, and best known for his portraits of early modern dancers, including Ruth St Denis, Agnes De Mille, Helen Tamiris and Martha Graham, with whom he maintained an extended artistic collaboration. He produced some of the only known images of the early black modern dancer, Edna Guy, and also photographed the modern dancer Harald Kreutzberg.
Cheryl Goldsleger is an American artist and educator. She has resided in Athens, Georgia, since 1977.
Christel Dillbohner is a German artist whose installations, paintings, and assemblages are deeply involved with the relationship between personal and cultural memory and the human struggle to live in threatened environments.
Amy Sherald is an American painter. She works mostly as a portraitist depicting African Americans in everyday settings. Her style is simplified realism, involving staged photographs of her subjects. Since 2012, her work has used grisaille to portray skin tones, a choice she describes as intended to challenge conventions about skin color and race.
April Sunami is a mixed-media artist based in Columbus, Ohio. Her work has been exhibited in museums, galleries and private collections across the United States, and in both Ghana and Cuba, and is represented in the permanent collections of the Southern Ohio Museum in Portsmouth, Ohio and the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center in Wilberforce, Ohio. She was described in the Columbus Dispatch by Columbus Museum of Art director Nannette Maciejunes as an heir to the legacy of Aminah Robinson. She has served in leadership roles in local arts organizations Creative Arts of Women, Mother Artists at Work and Creative Women of Color, served as Assistant Director at the William H. Thomas Gallery and was the first board president of All People Arts Incorporated. She is currently featured as part of the "Columbus Makes Art / Art Makes Columbus" tourism campaign as a face of Columbus art. She has a BA in Art History from Ohio State University and a MA in Art History from Ohio University. She is one of the current artists-in-residence at the Blockfort arts building. Her mentors in the world of art include Talle Bamazi, Stephanie Rond, Queen Brooks, and Bettye Stull.
Catherine Eaton Skinner is a multimedia artist with studios in Seattle, Washington and Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Bruno Civitico was an Italian-born American painter, draughtsman and teacher. He is widely considered to be "a major player in the development of Classicism," and "one of the most important artists of the Neoclassical Figurative revival movement."
Irene Pijoan was a Swiss-born American painter, sculptor, and educator. She was active in the San Francisco Bay Area and taught at the San Francisco Art Institute for more than 20 years.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
