Marcia Wood Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of abstract mixed media paintings by Eric Blum. Educated at UCLA and St. Martin’s in London, Blum has been highly regarded for mastering the difficult medium of encaustic since its re-emergence in the 1980s. With the upcoming body of paintings he is working with watercolor, silk and resin to equally stunning results. Currently living and working in New York City, Blum has exhibited widely nationally and was noted in the seminal publication on encaustic painting, “The Art of Encaustic Painting” (Joanne Mattera, 2001). Featured exhibitions include the Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN, The Albright Knox in Buffalo, New York and the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, OH.

Alternating many layers of resin, watercolor and silk, Blum pricks our subconscious with semi-abstract ambiguous forms that lie just below the paintings surface yet are trapped in an infinity that is both familiar yet elusive. The artist’s intent to “describe the ache and insatiability of desire” is achieved in the veils of transparent media, such as beeswax or resin, applied slowly, one layer per day, and infused with a distorted imagery to create something tactile and illusory. The multiple layers echo the multiplicity of interpretations to be found in the tantalizing glimpses of shifting forms and space. No sooner is an understanding realized than it slips away and, as the artist states, “Everything always turns out to be something else.”