Wax Figurative Drawings and Watercolors

"Sisters #2", 2019 by Valerie Hammond 73 x 34.5 inches unframed Pigment, Color Pencil, Wax, Glass Beads, and thread on Japanese Rice Paper Coated with Beeswax Vertical, indigo panels that are unframed, can be installed with magnets, but framing is recommended. In Valerie Hammond’s series of wax drawings, protection is two-fold: the artist (previously) encases dried flowers and ferns in a thin layer of wax, preserving their fragile tissues long after they’ve been plucked from the ground. In outlining a pair of hands, she also secures a memory, or rather, “the essence of a gesture and the fleeting moment in which it was made.” Centered on limbs lying flat on Japanese paper, the ongoing series dates back to the 1990s, when Hammond made the first tracing “partly in response to the death of a dear friend, whose beautiful hands I often found myself remembering.” She continued by working with family and friends, mainly women and children, to delineate their wrists, palms, and fingers. Today, the series features dozens of works that are comprised of either hands tethered to the dried botanics, which sprout outward in wispy tendrils, or others over layed with thread and glass beads. Although the delicate pieces began as a simple trace, Hammond shares that she soon began to overlay the original drawing with pressed florals, creating encaustic assemblages that “echoed the body’s bones, veins, and circulatory systems.” She continued to experiment with the series by introducing various techniques, including printmaking, Xerox transfers, and finally Photoshop inversions, that distorted the original rendering...

"Sisters #4", 2019 by Valerie Hammond 72 x 35 inches unframed Pigment, Color Pencil, Wax, Glass Beads, and thread on Japanese Rice Paper Coated with Beeswax Vertical, indigo panels ...