Emily Jung Miller

For the next eight days, I will be working on abstract encaustic wax paintings at the Marjie Mabel Project artist residency in Vancouver, Washington. I am producing a series of encaustics inspired by the Pacific Northwest winter landscape, incorporating locally found objects. This is an exciting challenge for me, as a realist painter, to explore abstract landscapes for the first time.

Day 1: Testing different surfaces and sizes

I decided to keep a journal during the residency. Here is the first entry.

Dec. 8

I arrived during the week of the first winter frost, driving north through a soft afternoon sunset. Layers of blue, peach, white and gray, distant flocks of birds making black specks in the sky. My first inspiration. The next morning, ice remained half-crystallized in puddles along the creek trail, but the fallen leaves were dry and crisp. I am on a mission. I focus on the ground, wandering off the paved trail, into the woodland paths leading down to the creek. I am always drawn to water. Here though, I am captured by the mud, by the layers of leaves and moss, serrated edges, skeletons of veins, variation and repetition, seeds, stones and grasses.

I pick up leaves. I pick up perfect leaves, misshapen leaves, an assortment of sizes and colors. I walk slowly. There is so much to see, and no reason to hurry. I am delighted to discover seeds: wispy cottony white; spiky brown clusters with the surprise of new green growth just emerging from inside; red berries a bright shock against pearly gray branches; white berries like dewdrops in a thicket of tan stalks. I find downy duck feathers. This is enough for the day.

Later it snows. The world is beautifully silent. I am still looking at leaves on the ground. Autumn reds and golds are buried under a transparent white cloud. I am here at a turning point, between seasons.

I sorted my leaves and pressed them flat to dry. I worked on my winter afternoon sky. I have been thinking about why I find such beauty and joy in nature. The endless change, every moment perfection, a million tiny impulses adding up to fallen leaves curling together, duck feathers with dots and stripes, pine cones with a hundred spiraling shingles. Why am I so attracted by this natural order?

Working on another project, I recently discovered that the grapefruit was known early in its history as the Forbidden Fruit, named by a reverend searching for the origin of the tree of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. The scientific study of nature was seen as a way to grow closer to understanding God. Closer to finding meaning in the physicality of our world.

Why is it like this?

Because this is the best way it has found to survive. To thrive.

Fantastically intricate, unique structures stand as evidence of optimal forms for specific conditions. Studying the form points back to the conditions that made it grow.

Is my delight in the imperfect a way of honoring the ways that we grow?

Detail of Winter Sky