Life is a mess.
A beautiful one.
Acrylic & Encaustic paintings by Durham-based, Detroit-born, artist, Dawn Church.
I make what I like to call pretty, meaningful messes.
My style melds together Abstract Expressionism and Contemporary Impressionism using a blend of embodied gestures and refined brushwork with luminous, vibrant colors. This duality of movement styles enables a collaboration between my vision and what the paint medium seems to insist upon becoming.
Each piece explores the relationship between pursuit & surrender; revealing the beauty that emerges when the two flow together.
I hope it inspires you to find beauty in the wholeness of life's messes.
About Dawn
Dawn Church is a dual-medium maker of pretty messes. Creating in acrylic and... negotiating with... encaustic paints, she explores perception and meaning-making, emotion and memory, and the wholeness of life and people. The result is always a vibrant, colorful, and meaningful mess.
A mostly self-taught impressionist, abstract expressionist style painter, Dawn relies on low-control techniques that insist her vision be tempered with a surrender to the mediums’ natural flow - including embodied movements, her own breath, her fingers and nails, and by the nature of encaustic paint, fire.
Her paintings become visual representations of the balance between deliberate pursuit and surrender; revealing the beauty that emerges when those work hand-in-hand.
It is her metaphor for our capacity to shape our lives within the context of the world we live in.
She holds a belief that while our lives are partly within our control and partly shaped by the constraints of our environment, our ability to experience joy and witness beauty lies entirely within our choice.
She hopes to invoke a sense of possibility in the spaces her work inhabits, reminding people that life is a mess, but it can be a beautiful one.