Winston Wächter Fine Art | Through 1/11 | Seattle, WA

Mystics

Betsy Eby: Mystics is on view at Winston Wächter Fine Art in Seattle through January 11.

The American Quaker John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a poem about the Vedic practice of consuming a hallucinogenic drink in rituals. As a Quaker he advocated, rather, waiting for “the still small voice of calm.”

Betsy Eby’s paintings provide an oasis of calm in a turbulent world—a reminder of deeper, broader truths. She says, “Lately, artists have the most important job; as social media has laid bare humanity's most base behavior, it’s the job of the artist to keep the collective imagination alive so that our social fabric doesn’t forget how to hope, invent and dream. Artists are the touchstones.”Nuages, hot wax, cold wax, ink and oil on prepared aluminum, 30 x 65"

Too often we lose touch with the deeper and the broader. Eby stays connected through music, nature and her painting “I think our unconscious mind has the collective unconscious as its reservoir,” she explains, “but it’s our conscious mind that can often cloud that ultimate knowing. There are patterns to be observed in nature as there are patterns to be observed in music. I’m incredibly fortunate to be able to live three months out of the year on Wheaton Island, surrounded by the sea and migrating birds. I regain my beginner’s mind in all the pulse and sway of the environment. The sea gets in me. The air gets in me. The birdsong gets in me. Out there, the Milky Way is so blazing and dense, you feel you could walk across it. The weather patterns are so dramatic they paint the sky with rapidly changing, fluid forms. On Wheaton Island, I fall back into what I call ‘summer voice,’ which has a carefree lilt to it. It’s three months of meditation. It’s my belief that the universe is a mirror and the life we’re given gives us endless opportunities to be the reflections of that which we choose to channel.”Forest Murmurs, hot wax, cold wax, ink and oil on panel, 48 x 36"

Life on Venus, hot wax, cold wax, ink and oil on panel, 30 x 48"

She paints in encaustic, “wax from bees and resin from trees” as she says, manipulated and transformed with elemental fire. The rising and falling of forms of color in her paintings creates an illusion of depth that invites the viewer to leave the material world and to enter an ambiguous space of “form and formlessness” that “reflects the sensory realm as a synesthetic culmination of music, light, movement and rest.”

“When I work with color,” she explains, “what is ultimately of concern is light. How to establish a resonance, an illusion of shimmer, an illusion of deep space so that, while my medium of encaustic does achieve a seductive surface, we also lose sight of the surface. A friend once said that my paintings are more of a verb than a noun. In the Light, And Then the Fancy Sings, hot wax, cold wax, ink and oil on panel, 48 x 60"

“Art is communication,” she continues. “It is a call and response to the universe. The artist gathers, channels, distills, executes, and presents a personal communication which hopefully resonates universally. Each painting is its own musical measure, part of the orchestration.”

Her most recent paintings can be seen in the exhibition Betsy Eby: Mystics at Winston Wächter Fine Art in Seattle through January 11. —

Winston Wächter Fine Art
203 Dexter Avenue North • Seattle, WA 98109 •
(206) 652-5855 • www.winstonwachter.com