WAX – Jenny Phillips & Larraine Seiden

JULY 8 – AUGUST 14, 2011

Reception:  Saturday July 16 | 6-8pm

Inclusions is pleased to present new encaustic paintings by San Francisco artists Jenny Phillips and Larraine Seiden.

Jenny Phillips has been painting and print making for 30 years.  In this new series of paintings she centers on feeling, rather than ideology. Drawn to quietness, subtlety and understatement, her work evokes the mood and luminosity that costal light and organic form inspire. Using the interplay of line work and texture she successfully strikes a balance of simplicity, expression and the rich sensory qualities of encaustic wax. Jenny grew up in the northeast.  Having spent her formative years at the Brooklyn Academy of Music,  the combination of theater, dance and music, continue to inform her work.  She is a graphic designer by trade and has worked with a number of design firms before settling in San Francisco where she’s launched her own studio.  She works and lives in Bernal Heights with her husband and two children.

Larraine Seiden uses the thick physicality of encaustic paint to explore experiences of inner and external place.  In this new series, Sensate of Place, she projects an emotional terrain onto the constructed world.  While the human figure is not immediately apparent, it is implied in the encaustic surfaces that she sees as skin.  Lines are built up and stretched by pressing fabric pieces into thick layers of wax pigment.  The undulating impressions suggest cityscapes, calendars, and maps that reflect the subjective nature of time and place.   Viewed together, the paintings are like a walking meditation on how we are marked by the spaces we inhabit and in turn mark/make them.  Larraine grew up in Pennsylvania where the fine craft of quilts and the town’s historic center made their lifelong impression.  She received her M.S. in Art and Design Education from Pratt after earning her B.A. in Studio Art from California State University.  She has taught art at the K-12 level and to adults in the Bay Area, Oaxaca City in Mexico and New York City.  Recently Larraine has worked with Betty Edwards, author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and her son Brian Bomeisler.  She is one of the very few certified to teach Betty Edward’s method.  Larraine is inspired by her husband, two little boys and by their city of San Francisco.  She exhibits her work in the Bay Area and throughout the United States.