Top left: Earth Air encaustic, carbon, gold on birch board 42x36
Top right: Let Evening Come encaustic on birch board 48x42
Second row left: Night Sky encaustic on birch board 28x13 (Sold)
Third row right: Nocturne In Gray And White encaustic on birch board 28x36
Bottom row: Horizon Yellow encaustic on birch board 11x8 (detail)
Heating, mixing, layering, scraping–these core techniques of the ancient art of encaustic painting underlie and empower the engaging recent works of Georgia Nassikas. She combines beeswax from her own hives with pure pigments to deconstruct the world we see and experience in both settling and unsettling ways. Perspectives shift, solid forms lift and fall, light glows seemingly from beneath the highly textured surfaces.
Her embrace of the tension between abstract and representational enliven her imagery and inspire the viewer to see the essential forms, lines, and colors in a landscape or object. Echoing her art, Georgia challenges us to scrape away our visual misperceptions, to add new layers of insight, to reflect on the fine balance, at art’s best, of final composition.
A student of art and art history in Italy and Spain in the late 1970s, Georgia further studied art and architecture at graduate design school in Boston in the early 1980s. As a young artist, she focused on drawing, watercolors, and oils. In recent years, she has dedicated herself to a challenging series of encaustic works, inspired by her time along the New England coast and her apiaries and gardens outside of Washington DC.