Land Ribbons, New Encaustic Works by Shannon Mello

Land Ribbons, new encaustic and mixed media paintings by Shannon Mello, opens at Divine West Gallery Friday September 25 from 3-7 pm. Divine West Gallery is located at 135 W. Palace Avenue in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Encaustic is an ancient medium that uses beeswax and tree resin along with pigments to create wonderful, highly textured and complementary layers on typically wood or canvas. In Mello’s case, the exhibition is titled Land Ribbons, a nod to the beautiful Southwestern landscapes as well as the layers that encaustic already tends to introduce through the process.

Land Ribbons will include big skies, dynamic color compositions and different contrasts of the color in the land itself while still creating an emphasis on the skies so prevalent in the Southwest. These works draw heavily from the Southwest landscape, using abstraction to reflect its scale, light and enduring sense of place rather than direct representation.

Mello will be painting live in the gallery during the opening reception as well as Saturday, September 26th all day. She will demonstrate the encaustic process she has been developing over the last twenty years.

“I am drawn to the moments of transition,” says Mello. “The light just before it shifts. The cloud that hasn’t decided yet what it will become. The way the earth changes between a moving sky– from ochre to green to rust, from flat to folded– and how that change reads differently depending on where the sun it and what the atmosphere is carrying.”