Nationality American Known for Encaustic painting | Name Betsy Eby | |
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Full Name Elizabeth Kerry Eby Awards 2001 Artists Trust Gap Grant Similar People Cy Twombly, Anselm Kiefer, Joan Mitchell, Mark Tobey, Brice Marden | ||
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Betsy Eby (born April 3, 1967) is an American encaustic painter. She splits her time between Columbus, Georgia and Wheaton Island, Maine.
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Life
Betsy Eby was born on April 3, 1967 in the small coastal city of Seaside, Oregon. She earned her Bachelor's Degree in art history at the University of Oregon, with an emphasis in ancient Greek, Roman and Asian antiquities. During Betsy's internship at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, her aesthetic was influenced by Asian Landscape painting as well as the work of Pacific Northwest masters that she catalogued. After graduation, she lived briefly in Tokyo and was deeply influenced by Japanese history and culture. She has practiced classical piano since the age of five.
Betsy Eby currently lives on an island off the coast of Maine in the summer, and in Columbus, Georgia through the winter. She is married to artist Bo Bartlett.
Work
Rhythm, balance, lyricism and tone in Betsy Eby’s paintings are influenced by her lifelong devotion to music. Her paintings are informed by the natural world, drawing on forms found on both microscopic and macroscopic scales. Her calligraphic compositions draw on the movement of living things and visual forms echoed throughout nature. Her works resonate with the experience of observing natural phenomena, such as the patterns created by a flock of birds taking flight, the substance of interplanetary nebula, and the whorls of sea grass found in a tide pool. Her subject matter, composition, color and surface luminosity are informed by the wet coastal climate and ecosystem of the Pacific Northwest. Her works utilize abstraction and elemental reduction to portray essence and movement, rather than relying solely on observation or pure abstraction.
Betsy Eby works in encaustic, a medium that dates back to the 4th Century BC and was written about in the works of Roman scholar Pliny the Elder. Her paintings are created of pigmented beeswax, in a complex process of layering and torching, with a variety of methods in paint application. She balances compositional concerns with the material properties of the beeswax itself in an organic process of creation. She works within the context of the physical dimension of the wax and the way the it obfuscates color, all the while building to a finished surface with a sculptural surface which glistens like poured resin.
Public Collections
Betsy Eby has a number of works in public buildings including Westin Hotel, Bellevue, Starfish Restaurant, Seattle and Stanford University, Palo Alto, along with the Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA American Cancer Society, National Collection
