Mari Renwick is primarily an encaustic painter living and working in both Brooklyn and upstate NY.  Her work is often influenced by the flora of the Catskills region, including the dried seed-pods and spent flowers remaining past the summer season.

Mari teaches encaustic painting at Brooklyn Art Space/Trestle in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, NY.

Mari Renwick-Artist Statement
Surface. Entombment. Excavation. Obfuscation.
Working with wax in an intimate, often combative, engagement, I am compelled by the challenge of manipulating this medium. Dragging, digging, and scraping are paramount responses in the process and facilitate my creating a surface of interest. I often paint on small wood panels which are placed together with other pieces.
By adding simple images, words, and shapes, both spontaneous and considered, the result of a stream of consciousness/journal-type documentation, a snapshot of the moment is exposed.  Isolated and fetishized, the incised objects drawn into the wax are elevated to iconic importance yet often diminished or veiled by the hazy patina of age.
The viewer is invited to excavate the layers for clues to a narrative which is simultaneously revealed and obfuscated, an example of my ambivalence to share my visual diary.
Some of my recent work focuses on layering images of various botanicals and their blurred and distorted shadows.