Winston Wächter Fine Art, New York is pleased to announce This is Where I Begin, a new series of large-scale encaustic and oil paintings by Betsy Eby. In this series, Eby seeks to harness the beauty of musical harmony and the edgy unpredictability of natural wilderness by creating works that look as though the wind itself has flooded the canvases with color and movement.
Betsy Eby continues to work with bold, saturated colors that dance and play against creamy, ambient fields. These large, abstract works evoke fluid movement and gestures found in nature. Here, Eby works in a more painterly process than in previous series, incorporating more oil paint into her media alongside inks, pigments, and hot and cold wax. She works with palette knives, brushes, spatulas, baking mats, and her hands to create layers of paint that organically ebb and flow. Embracing texture in a new way, Eby creates surfaces that evoke a kind of decay, but embrace the beauty in the undoing and the unraveling.
Betsy Eby’s practice is slow, thoughtful, and intuitive. Through meditation, Eby strives to live in the moment, yet acknowledges that each moment is not new, but built on the wisdom of past accomplishments, epiphanies, and failures. “The more I let go, the more I feel like every moment is where I begin,” she writes. “Every new painting is where I begin,” and every mark is a pivot point, as she channels the beauty and chaos in the world through a unique filter inspired by her study of music theory, nature, Zen philosophy, Romanticism, mythology, mysticism, and her own lived environment.
Betsy Eby received her BA from the University of Oregon. She and her husband, painter Bo Bartlett, split their time between studios in Columbus, Georgia, and Wheaton Island, Maine. She savors the spaciousness and light of both of these studios, and her paintings evoke the atmosphere of the vast ocean that surrounds her small island residence in Maine. Her work has been shown and collected by the Georgia Museum of Art and the Columbus Museum, and she has shown frequently with Winston Wachter Fine Art in both the Seattle and New York galleries
