Winston Wœchter Fine Art is pleased to announce the opening of Rhythms of this Earthly Life, comprising Betsy Eby’s latest abstract paintings and works on paper. This body of large, encaustic works was completed during Eby's self-imposed exile to a remote island 25 miles off the coast of Maine. The rogue landscape and ascetic living conditions infused a rawness into her latest pictures, as well as a greater emphasis on line. In these nature-inspired paintings, executed lines move from pelagic rhythms to concentrated tangles, drifting and swaying, suspended and buried amidst seemingly sea-bleached surfaces of white wax. The drips and unfettered gestures suggest microscopic life-forms, both aquatic or airborne.

Eby’s new paintings exude sensuality, however physical grit is perceptible beneath the surface. This tension is a result of the artist’s physical labor -- pouring wax and utilizing the element of fire within a working process of controlled accident. With this body of work, Eby points to other artists who work remotely, like Anselm Kiefer, Cy Twombly, Lee Bontecou and Antoni Tapies. As these artists tap ineffable nature, similarly Eby explores the rich world of materiality to express the subjective and sensory, evoking time, place and states of being. In her earlier works, Eby imparted gravity through an abstracted horizon line or a deeper saturation within the lower one third of the composition. While some of the earlier pieces in her new oeuvre suggest these roots, the majority of pictures in Rhythms of this Earthly Life, shed any notion of gravity, in a palpable release of dimensional perspective.

Eby was born in a small coastal town in Oregon where she was influenced early on by the sea, forests and swamps. She now shares her time between Seattle and Maine. Classical music, which she has practiced since a young age, is a dominant influence in her life and painting, contributing to the rhythmic quality of her compositions. Through a restraint in palette and nuance of surface, Eby’s works exhibit a luminous radiance. In these paintings a meditation is offered up to those who are willing

For further information please contact Amanda Snyder at [212] 327 2526