Betsy Eby “Garden Riot”

Winston Wachter Fine Art

[Image: Betsy Eby "Ever" (2019) Hot wax, cold wax, oil on prepared aluminum, 48 x 36 in.]

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Winston Wächter Fine Art, New York presents Garden Riot, an exhibition of new, large-scale encaustic paintings by Betsy Eby. Musical lyricism and the wildness of nature inspire these vibrant paintings, which embrace sensuality and earthly delights as a counterbalance in an increasingly informational age.

Garden Riot reveals a new boldness in color in Eby’s work, as she finds herself re-engaging with the core tenets of her practice. An accomplished classical pianist, Eby has always been influenced by the lyricism, rhythm, and cadence of music. As she deepens her study of harmonic structure, Eby finds she can hear more musical color and textures. This has directly influenced the unbridled gestures and new color relationships in this body of work. In Garden Riot, Eby explores new techniques in her encaustic method, combining layers of hot wax and cold wax, ink and pigments, as she pushes for new depths of color, saturation, and movement.

This series celebrates the pleasures of all things sumptuous and sensual and riotous and life affirming, a release from the concerns of daily life. It can often seem like we live in a time of intense polarity and cultural tensions, an age dominated by information. “I’m tired of the dueling nature of man,” Eby writes. In response, Eby encourages viewers to turn toward light and recognize the brilliance of everything, “from the light within all of us to the larger, cosmic organism of which we are all a part.” Garden Riot offers a return to splendor.

Betsy Eby received her BA from the University of Oregon. She and her husband, painter Bo Bartlett, split their time between studios in Columbus, Georgia, and Wheaton Island, Maine. She savors the spaciousness and light of both of these studios, and her paintings evoke the atmosphere of the vast ocean that surrounds her small island residence in Maine. Her work has been shown and collected by the Georgia Museum of Art and the Columbus Museum, and she has shown frequently with Winston Wachter Fine Art in both the Seattle and New York galleries.