BIOGRAPHY

Lisa Bick is an American artist from Washington, D.C. She is best known for her encaustic or wax-based paintings as well as her mixed media work in textile and photography. Her work has been exhibited at numerous fine art institutions and galleries, including the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the National Encaustic Art Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where her work is also part of the permanent collection. Lisa trained in photography at George Washington University and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art with a concentration in textile and fiber arts from Indiana University. She currently lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

 

ARTIST STATEMENT

I was raised in Washington, D.C., where I spent hours of my life exploring the halls of the National Gallery of Art as well as the Textile Museum, the Renwick, the Corcoran and the Phillips Collection. Art and the act of creating are simply my second nature. 

I went to Indiana University where I earned a Fine Arts degree with a focus on printed and dyed textiles, which led me to explore weaving and photo silk-screening. Tactile fibers and the rich layering of textiles move me to speculation of the “in-between.” After years of focusing my practice on fiber art, photography, and the intersections between the two, I began experimenting with encaustic. It has been a revelation. The medium opened a space in which all my disciplines and interests come into dialogue and engage in a push-and-pull with one another.  The textural quality of the wax creates ephemeral veils that can screen or dissimulate imagery, poetry, photographs, and moods. Natural beeswax feels ancient and sacred as the layers evolve into windows between my spiritual self and my continuing investigations into the reason for being. What is outside or inside those windows and how to touch both at once is part of my quest to represent the past dragged into the present. Simple explorations for fragments of information, the architecture of interior spaces, and the construction of memory are the result of personal topologies marked by loss, longing, and desire. The fragility of encaustic has become the perfect medium for me to construct this matrix.

My story is simple, yet complex and interwoven with experiences that have shaped me. I lived in London briefly, and I recently spent a summer living and working in Tuscany. In the afternoons, I took trains to Florence or Lucca and found myself roaming cobblestoned streets, touching stones and sculptures or peering through courtyards and palace windows. Travels to China, Russia, India, Central America and Europe all come together to create ideas. Along the way, three children challenged me to expose their eyes to everything small and infinite in the world with as much creativity as possible. Every day, in my own world, I strive to do the same.

– Lisa Bick