NEWFANE — This month at the Crowell Art Gallery at Moore Free Library, two artists will share gallery space: Sharon Myers, a sculptor who also works in paper, and Karma Kitaj, exhibiting the ancient art of encaustic painting.
The exhibit, Luminous Uncharted Spaces, will be on display through July 31 and is free and open to all. An artists' reception will be held Saturday, July 8, from 1 to 3 p.m.
Kitaj was introduced to the medium of encaustic (meaning to “burn in”), the ancient art of painting with pigmented molten wax, and she said she fell in love with “the luminosity of the wax, the smell of it, the layering, the embedding of anything not too heavy, the building up of the surface into texture or 3-D, and the torching of shellac or alcohol inks on wax to create undulating shapes.”
Myers started her career as an art teacher. She has been an artist and a chef for most of her life. Traditionally trained in sculpture and a self-taught quilt artist, in 2010, she went to graduate school to get her MFA.
For five years, she challenged herself to do work that she had never dreamed of doing. When she graduated in 2015, her thesis piece was an installation in four parts: collage, print, fabric, and calligraphy, exploring the state of marriage and weddings. Her exhibit this month is a combination of all these mediums.