HOT WAX IN CONNECTICUT

Romantic Nature artwork by Martin Kline at the New Britain Museum of American Art through June 17, 2012.

Artist Martin Kline’s encaustic art are incredible gravity defying creations which I viewed last week at his midcareer retrospective at the New Britain Museum of American Art. Encaustic, heated pigmented wax pulled and manipulated in space is an interesting medium dating back to ancient Roman sarcophagi. His patterned, three dimensional landscapes pulsate with details similar to those found in nature evoking the same feelings of both soothing repetition and overwhelming awe. I marvel at how each individual lobe is precisely repeated like turkey tail fungi in  three dimensional patterns radiating from a primal source. Waves, waterfalls, the cosmos, lava flow all come to mind with his work. The undulating forms with burnished surfaces are hard not to touch.

You are met outside the front door of the New Britain Museum of American Art, a truly great New England museum with a bronze casting of one of his own encaustic works resting on a huge easel also of bronze. In the upstairs gallery the colors of tactile surfaces refer not only to nature but to art history itself. In the Agnes Lewitt a silver wax topographical grid on board combines his respect of artists' Agnes Martin and Connecticut’s Sol Lewitt. Kline's creations are marvelously lush and minimalist at the same time and well worth the trip.

And be sure not to miss Walton Ford’s large painting Fallen Mias from 2000 in the next room. Ford recently wowed students at the Lyme Academy with a talk about his work and career.