April 29 - May 31, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday, May 1, 6-8 pm
Barb Cone: “Melting Point”
Mary Bablitch: “Spirited Geometries”
Barb Cone: “Waxen Weave,” 36”X36”X1.5”, encaustic and oil stick on cradled birch panel, 2026
Barb Cone:
“Melting Point”
I have long been interested in encaustic, the ancient, versatile and technically-challenging material. The Greeks derived the term “enkaustikos” or burned in, originally describing colored beeswax they used to caulk their warships. Later, encaustic was widely used in Roman-era murals. However, the most well-known of ancient encaustic works are the “Fayum” Mummy Portraits, a series of encaustic funerary portraits created during a person’s lifetime, then attached to the person’s remains after death. Because of the durability of the encaustic paint and the dry Mediterranean climate, these portraits have retained a colorful and life-like appearance.
My first introduction to encaustic was in a workshop decades ago in the high desert of New Mexico. Encaustic was a perfect medium to express the sharp edges and high color contrasts of this landscape. Representational work was difficult if not impossible, so shapes were abstracted, the surfaces built up and carved back. he melted beeswax filled the studio with its own sweet smell. Within a short time I was hooked.
Encaustic is melted, then applied quickly while in its melted state. It is then then lightly fused with a heat gun or blow-torch. Pouring pitchers of melted encaustic medium to form the base of the paintings is a challenge as the wax tends to cool quickly and harden too soon. While encaustic paintings are usually small-scale due to the difficulty of controlling the movement of the melted paint, my goal has been to push the boundaries by working ever larger. The work has become more physical as I work larger. This created a particular problem this past Fall after I shattered my leg, had metal pieces implanted during emergency surgery and was laid up for six months. I think of “Melting Point” as “my fractured leg challenge.”
Mary Bablitch: “Blue Note,” work on paper, 35” x 27”, 2024
Mary Bablitch:
“Spirited Geometries”
Spirited Geometries, new work by Boston artist Mary Bablitch, features works on paper that explore color, spatial arrangement, and personal perspective.
Bablitch's painted paper works inhabit the charged space between painting and collage, construction and composition. "My work always emerges from color, I paint flat hues onto large sheets of paper, pairing shapes and forms according to an inner logic," says the artist. Sheets are cut and assembled into layered constellations of form that assert a physical presence while remaining resolutely two-dimensional. Warm earth tones, sienna, ochre, deep burgundy — collide with cool slates and unexpected passages of acid green, creating chromatic tensions that animate the overlapping planes.
Bablitch combines found vintage materials with hand-painted colored papers. She considers the surrounding white of each composition an active foil, breathing space into the cluster and allowing the eye to register each shape. Striations and patterned surfaces interrupt solid fields, introducing rhythm and a suggestion of architectural detail. Gravity and balance are perpetual concerns: forms lean, wedge, and cantilever against one another in compositions that feel precarious yet resolved.
Her artistic lineage includes color theorist Josef Albers and Stuart Davis, whose work responded to the rhythms and colors of the urban environment, a sensibility Bablitch shares, finding nonobjective design in the textures of city life. Her years as a professional interior designer have deepened a long interest in spatial arrangement, evident throughout this current body of work in the confidence with which color, form, and negative space are orchestrated into dynamic, spirited wholes.