Using cold wax medium with oil paint, powdered pigments, and pigment stick, Rebecca Crowell builds up layered surfaces as she also scratches, scrapes, and dissolves her layers, selectively revealing underlying color and value. Crowell is, in fact, a master of cold wax painting, having conducted workshops for other artists on the medium for nearly a decade, and published a text on its use (2017). Her abstract images read as cropped portions of ancient, geological surfaces, with textural variety hinting at fault lines, mineral veins, aged moss, and calcification. Dissonant to her geological referent, however, is a play of light and a slight, occasional translucence, yielding a seemingly internal glow. Without straightforward representation or symbolism, Crowell manages to elicit the brand of awe we associate with the natural world and evidence of the extreme passage of time.
