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Trout Water #2

Trout Water #2 - Encaustic
Accession #: 4234.14
Title: Trout Water #2
Object Type: Encaustic
Participants:
Physical Description: Grey and black encaustic on linen on board; the background is mottled grey with a black rectangle in the center of the image. The black rectangle has hints of blue, red, green, yellow, and orange in it [it looks like many colors layered to create a dark brown or black?]. The edge of the image is lighter grey and it gets darker in rectangle shades toward the black rectangle in the center. The edge is painted black. The image is signed in black beneath the encaustic on the lower right corner. The verso is signed in black ink "Trout water #2 Joseph Goldberg 1985".
Description: Goldberg employs an ancient and unusual technique called encaustic painting. First used by the Greeks, encaustic is perhaps man's earliest formal easel-painting method. It consists of mixing dry pigments with molten beeswax and warm resin. After many layers of this mixture are applied the surface is heated with a blowtorch to fuse and bond it. It is then buffed with a soft cloth. Goldberg's restrained, elegant compositions not only showcase the encaustic technique, but result in an appropriately primitive and monolithic image. The artist has received national recognition for his work and is included in many prominent collections. In 1980 he was the winner of the Betty Bowen Memorial Award presented annually by the Seattle Art Museum to a local artist of great promise. "Trout Water #2 is an absolutely stunning painting, somehow both monumental and fragile, a geometric abstraction, but one that reports an intimate engagement with the physical world. That world continuously and everywhere gives forth geometry - a basalt column, a circle started from a moth's touch on a pond - but always in this painter's work it is a geometry made rich and imperfect by time... The best of his paintings live in an element somewhere between rock and language; they make a mysterious peace between fact and message. Physical, geologic and geographic depth is one implication of Goldberg's mastery of his difficult medium; another is temporal depth. The deep spaciousness of time seems to breath from his color." (Quoted from: Rust, Mike. "Art show: Deeper into the Visible." Accessed February 23, 2011. http://www.gregkucera.com/goldberg_reviews.htm)
Category: Art
Subjects/Topics/Concepts:
Abstract (Artwork->Subject)
Dimensions:
Image Dimensions HxW 71 1/2 x 48 "
support depth 1 3/4"
Materials/Techniques:
wax (Material)
linen (material) (Material)
Marks/Inscription:
Trout Water #2 Joseph Goldberg 1985 (Written on verso TRC in black ink)
Related Exhibits:
Credit Line: Gift of Safeco Insurance, a member of the Liberty Mutual Group, and Washington Art Consortium.
Copyright:
fair use
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Through the protection of Fair Use (section 107, title 17, U.S. Code), we are able to provide thumbnail images of works in our collection for which we may not hold the rights. If you are the current rights holder to a work housed in our permanent collection, we would like to make your works available for educational use. Please contact the Registrar to discuss reproduction permissions.

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