Beginning her painting career 17 years ago with oils, artist Deann Mills displays the expansion of her prowess across media with her new show Wonderland at MUSE Gallery. In this First Friday episode of Artblog Radio, Deann shares how she moved into encaustic work and used a 6-month stay at her farmhouse in Maine to fuel her creativity. You can witness the brilliant show for yourself through February 2, 2020!
Many thanks to Deann and the collective of artists at MUSE Gallery for allowing Artblog to record this podcast in their gallery.
Deann Mills, “Wonderland,” January 1- February 2, 2020, MUSE Gallery, 52 North Second Street, Old City, Philadelphia 19106, 215-627-5310
You can listen to Artblog Radio on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Thank you to Kyle McKay for composing Artblog Radio’s original podcast intro and outro!
Wit López: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Artblog Radio. I’m your host for today, Wit López, and I am super excited that this is our first podcast of the New Year. Happy 2020 everybody! So this is also our first First Friday series podcast for the New Year, and I am excited to be sitting here with Deann Mills in Muse Gallery. If you don’t know Muse Gallery, it’s located at 52 N 2nd Street in the Old City section of Philadelphia. Welcome to the show, Deann.
Dean Mills: Thank you. It’s exciting to be here with you on this cold rainy day, but at least it’s not a blizzard.
Wit López: (laughter) Absolutely. I’m also very grateful that it’s not a blizzard. So, Deann, this work that we are surrounded by right now in the gallery is absolutely breathtaking. It is gorgeous. It is so expertly done. I’m very excited to be able to witness this in person. And so this show which is Wonderland, right?
Dean Mills: Right, I titled it “Wonderland”, which is, it sort of means two things. Um, this work was all done in my old barn up in Maine, on the coast of Maine this past summer. And I did a lot of hiking, like, when I wasn’t painting, and my favorite hike of the summer, which happens to be an easy hike also, in Acadia National Park, is titled Wonderland. So, you go out on these flat rocks that have all kinds of patterns and ridges and cracks and you’re out on the Atlantic Ocean and it’s stunning. So I loved that hike, and also, at the same time, I was learning to paint with encaustic, which is an old, old ancient technique of painting where you paint with hot wax and paint pigment. So I was doing that part of the time and that was just this amazing experience to figure out how to paint and express myself with this ancient technique, so that was also sort of this wonderland of like, everyday, what am I going to experience? What am I going to see? What am I going to do in my own barn? so the title seemed to fit both what I was doing when I was having fun up in Maine, and when I was in my studio up in Maine.
Wit López: That’s wonderful. So it’s, so it’s kind of a two-layered, it’s a multi-layered meeting for you.
Dean Mills: Right, and I, I have to say when I paint, so the, this is my first show with encaustic. I learned how to paint with encaustic this past year in February of 2019.
Wit López: Amazing, amazing.
Dean Mills: Before that I, I actually started painting in 2003, oil on canvas. Um, love it, love it, but I was sort of ready for something different, and a lot of people who have seen my art would comment, “Oh, it looks like encaustic!” And I thought, what does that mean? So I thought, ‘well, I should figure out what it means,’ so I took several workshops in encaustic, and I was sort of ready for a change, a different direction in my work, and this was just the right thing at the right time. So, I started doing it and I’m not sure what I’ll do after this, if I’ll go back to oil on canvas or stay with encaustic.
Wit López: Well, either way, regardless of which direction you decide to choose, this is really, really beautiful work. Like it’s, I feel like it’s so expertly done, and I love the layers to it. Um, it’s, as I mentioned before, it really reminds me of Rothko work, you know, just seeing the way you layered the colors over each other and it’s, it’s just, ugh, it’s amazing. It’s really amazing. One of the pieces that really caught my eye when I walked in is on the left hand wall, and to me it looks almost like white birch trees in a forest. It’s beautiful. I love the way you kind of capture that movement of the white, the white encaustic between these colored layers, so.
Dean Mills: So, it’s interesting because that’s the last painting I did, and I wouldn’t call it a series but I would say, so, starting up in Maine, like, I took these workshops, I took four workshops and I, I want to paint big, I like big. My oil on canvas paintings, the largest I’ve painted is six feet by four feet. So with encaustic, most encaustic painters don’t paint that large because it just becomes very, very heavy, because you have to paint on a, on a solid frame. You can’t paint on just canvas, because the wobbling of the canvas, it would crack the wax.
Wit López: Ohhh.
Dean Mills: So you have to paint on wood or something as solid as wood. So your, the frames, these wood panels just become heavy when they arrive and then you start layering the wax on and they get even heavier, so moving them becomes an issue. But I still, I like big. I like big where I can sort of walk into it.
Wit López: Absolutely.
Dean Mills: So I started, like, the one behind me is one I did, actually, before I went up to Maine and I was just trying to sort of paint bigger and bigger and bigger. Um,
Wit López: And what size is that canvas?
Dean Mills: That one is 24 inches square.
Wit López: It’s really beautiful. I love the way you have that gold color and the turquoise and then pops of red around it. It’s really beautiful.
Dean Mills: So that one I was, that I painted in my studio here in Philadelphia, which is in the basement of my house and it’s a great studio but the ceilings are only seven and a half feet high. So its kinda like “Eeee.” (laughter) Um, and I was looking at old photos of traveling that was in India and some of the walls at this, these temples in Khajuraho. So I was just looking at photos I’d made and getting inspiration from them, but then, so then up in Maine, I kept just trying to go bigger and bigger and bigger, and the biggest I’m gonna go was four feet by five feet, just because, like you said, even hanging on the walls in the gallery today I thought okay, let’s hope this works. (laughter) But I have my stud finder so I can find the-
Wit López: Oh that’s wonderful.
Dean Mills: the studs and they’re staying up on the wall so far. Um, so, that was a challenge, trying to go big with encaustic because when you paint with encaustic it dries immediately, so it’s, that, with oil paint, it stays wet for days and you can move it and mix it. I, I did a lot of like wet painting on oil, with oil on canvas because you can mix with it for days, but the encaustic dries immediately, and then you can carve into it, you can scrape it down, and you have to fuse it with heat with a blowtorch. So there’s this whole second part of painting, there’s actually the putting the paint down on the wood panel and then there’s what you do with your blowtorch. So it’s, it’s a whole new world of possibilities, and I feel like this show, it’s like the start of my encaustic work because I think ‘Okay, I’m at this point, I like it but there’s so much more that’s possible to do.’
Wit López: Well if this is a start, this is an amazing, (laughter) this is a very amazing beginning. It’s, it’s beautiful, it’s breathtaking. I really love this piece over here towards the back of the gallery, where it’s like multiple colored lines, because
Dean Mills: That’s interesting.
Wit López: It’s beautiful.
Dean Mills: I want to talk about that one and then I want to get back to the birch trees, which you mentioned. Um, I’ll talk about this one first. So this is, I titled it “King of the Early” because that’s a type of bean that my next door neighbor in Maine mentioned and I just thought, ‘What a funny name for a bean’ like, King of the Early?
Wit López: That is, yeah.
Dean Mills: ‘Cause we have a big garden up there in Maine. Okay, but also this was the first painting of this type that I did. The other two are going to hang in the window. So what was happening, I had painted something and I just didn’t really like it. So, you use a lot of potter’s tools. So I had a potter’s tool that’s basically a little metal loop and when the wax is soft, you can just scrape with this potter’s tool
Wit López: Mm, okay.
Dean Mills: and the wax comes up like a ribbon.
Wit López: Ohhhh.
Dean Mills: So, I was working on this other painting, not liking it and just scraping it and these ribbons of wax were coming up and I thought, ‘Well, those are kind of cool.’ I’m not just going to throw them away or melt them down. So I took this wood panel, which is four feet by four feet, and I just started laying those ribbons of wax on the panel in rows.
Wit López: Wow.
Dean Mills: And I love what happened!
Wit López: I do too. It’s beautiful. That’s really gorgeous.
Dean Mills: And so then I started making what I, so I, that went for maybe, like, six inches, and then I had to start making what I called a ‘donor painting.’ Like I would just paint, like, with the hot wax on another panel, let it dry, and then scrape it up in these ribbons. And so then as I went across, I thought, ‘well now I want, like, an orange zone.’ And so I did a lot of orange on my donor painting, scraped it up, and put it on there. And I went across and I, I do, like, this is one of my favorite paintings, “King of the Early” named for this variety of bean, and also because it was the first painting I did like this. But then, you start to get these technical difficulties because you’re, you got these ribbons of wax and then you have to fill it in with just the plain medium.
Wit López: I was just going to ask you about the fill-in. (laughter)
Dean Mills: And so that sounds easy, but it actually presents a lot of technical issues with the encaustic. You get a lot of bubbles, you get a lot of air bubbles, and, you know, who’s to say air bubbles are good or bad? I think as an artist, you just have to decide ‘do I like them or not?’ But I decided I didn’t like too many air bubbles, and also you want it, you want everything to adhere. You don’t want the painting to start coming off of the wood panel.
Wit López: Absolutely.
Dean Mills: So, anyway, this one was just, like, total fun, just, like, ‘what is gonna happen?’ and I love it because it has that just sort of freedom in it, the, you know, ‘who cares?’
Wit López: Yes.
Dean Mills: And then after that I did two more, the two in the window. One’s facing in, one’s facing out. And after I did three, I’m like, ‘Okay, I’m done with these, like, this is way too hard.’ Because you’re basically painting on one painting, stripping it off, pasting it on another and then trying to get everything to adhere. Anyway, yeah, I do love that one. I think it’s just sort of magical.
Wit López: That’s amazing. And I love your process for it. That’s really wonderful. So when you’ve got the ribbons of wax to adhere to the surface, were you using more wax or were you just softening those with your blowtorch?
Dean Mills: So it’s, I’d say a little of both. If you soften them with the blowtorch, they will melt, I’d go show you but, like, some of the strips you can see where then you get color, sort of fuzzy color next to the strip,
Wit López: Yes.
Dean Mills: That’s where I was trying to adhere with the blowtorch and it started melting the strip.
Wit López: Oh, okay.
Dean Mills: And I did that and I thought ‘Hmm, I’m losing the integrity of the strip’ so I liked it a little, but mostly what I did is then put the medium with no paint pigment in it in between the strips and try to fill in the sort of valleys and then fuse all of it together. And also, what’s, like, if you’re an encaustic artist, you would notice this, like, some of the paint looks like it’s right on the surface. That’s because then you scrape and so some of the pigment is way further back and that just becomes kind of foggy and hazy, but there’s some of the color that’s right on the surface, and that’s because it is right on the surface. (laughter) Um, and I liked that too, that sort of undulation-
Wit López: Absolutely.
Dean Mills: -of color going, so not only do you have these lines that sort of undulate, but the color also goes in and out.
Wit López: It does, and I noticed that quality in a lot of your work, that there’s this color that goes in and out and, like you said, undulation between the colors, so there’s a lot of, it feels like a lot of movement in each of your pieces. It’s really, it’s really wonderful, wonderful quality, and I love that you’re, you’re exploring that with encaustic. So when you first decided to start painting in 2003, you said you started with oils, right?
Dean Mills: I did. So, my professional background is as an architect.
Wit López: Oh! Nice!
Dean Mills: So I have a master’s in architecture. I practiced architecture for 17 years. Loved it. Um, moved to Philadelphia in 2000 with three little kids and my husband with every intention of going back to work. My experience in architecture, my projects were large, institutional projects, hospitals, research labs, um, I worked in Houston, Boston and Madison, Wisconsin. Anyway. Moved here with little kids, of course, I go back to work, and after two months of sort of getting settled in I thought, ‘I don’t think I need a job,’ like I have these three little kids running around, so, I didn’t go back to work immediately, then that stretched to, like, a couple of years, and then I thought, now I, I’m ready for, like, something different. So I took classes in different things. I took a painting class. It was Landscapes Outside at a, an estate in Gladwyne called Appleford,
Wit López: Oh, nice.
Dean Mills: so I was painting trees and bushes and I loved it! I loved it. So I took more classes, got bigger, and went abstract. Like, I was painting water lilies in the pond out there and then my water lilies got bigger and wilder and crazier and-
Wit López: (laughter) That’s wonderful.
Dean Mills: I thought, yeah, and my painting instructors kept saying “you need to go bigger, you need to go bigger” like, (laughter), even now I find it very difficult to paint small. So with encaustic, I had to go back to small just because I was learning how to manage it, how to just manage this huge wood panel. With oil, you typically paint vertically, um, and you can step back and look at it a lot but with encaustic, you, it’s more, it’s just easier to paint flat. And you have to be really close to your heat source. So just learning how to do that, how to have a big flat space, how to be able to look at it when it’s flat, um, that took getting used to so it was easy to start small and just get bigger and bigger. So every time I would order more panels, I would just order a bigger size until I reached my limit.
Wit López: That’s wonderful. So in the exploration of oils, did you ever consider any other paint media beside encaustic?
Dean Mills: I mean, I started with oil and that’s, I have to say it’s my first love. I never really painted with acrylic.
Wit López: Wow.
Dean Mills: So, and most of the, my fellow painters, especially here in this gallery. paint with acrylic and I just never, I never did. I, and so I have a huge number of oils, I know oil paint and I, I guess I just got stuck with oil. So now I’ve got oil and encaustic in my toolbox.
Wit López: That’s amazing. You really, you really have a handle on both of them. Your work is amazing. So I’m glad that you’ve undertaken both of those. So you mentioned that you have a barn in Maine, a farmhouse that you, you and your husband purchased two years ago. And you spent, uh, six months up there?
Dean Mills: I, right. So that, talk about a totally impulsive thing to do. (laughter) My husband and I, we took a week off in August of 2017? Is that right? Yeah, 2017. And we just went up to Acadia National Park, which is a place we love, and our kids didn’t want to come with us, they’re all in their 20s and we’re like, that’s fine. So, we were there for a week, fabulous week, and we saw this old farmhouse that was about to be foreclosed on, that’s on the coast, old barn, and the day we actually saw it, it was unlocked. It was empty, unlocked, and we wandered through it and we just thought ‘we have to buy this place.’ Like, it’s so amazing. And, it was crazy because going up there we thought, you know, ‘We’re so smart. We don’t have a vacation home. That would be a pain in the butt and a lot of money and you always have to go to the same place to vacation.’ (laughter) And what did we do? We fell in love with this old farmhouse and we were, we were able to buy it even though it was being foreclosed on. So this past summer, I said, “I’m going to go up there. I’m going to stay up there for six months.” The winters in Maine are not that great, but the summers are just brilliant. Um, and my husband could come back and forth, because he works full time, and so I gave myself a deadline, and the deadline was the show. I’ve gotta, like, get a body of work for this January show. And I set up the barn with light, it doesn’t have heat, but that’s okay in the summer, tables, enough electricity to melt my wax and I painted all summer and it was glorious. Um, so you mentioned the birch trees because, I have three small ones that I really was look, like all these hikes we would do, and the trees and the trees and the fog. I loved the fog in Maine. And I would say this show uses a lot more of like black and white than I used in the past just because of all this time in the outdoors with the fog and the dark trees and the dark rocks. So I would do these, what are basically birch trees but abstracted.
Wit López: Mmm.
Dean Mills: So, the small one there was the first one and then I kept getting bigger and bigger, and there’s a couple that I’m not sure will make it in the show. And then this one that you mentioned before is the last one I did where, I think is really the most realistic. I was really saying “Okay, what would a birch tree look like?” But this contrast and light and dark really excites me, and also the linear part of it, and you can, you know, I can try to be really straight or I can be like crazy curvy, but still keeping that linear repetition. That’s, that really excites me, so even these two large abstract ones here in the middle of the gallery, it’s still this kind of theme of this black and white and the, the birch trees. So,
Wit López: Absolutely. No, that’s, that’s really amazing. And it does kind of feel like what you would see when you go on a hike, what you would experience, just the closeness of the trees and, and also the depth of them. Some are wider, some are thinner, so it’s like they’re, some, the thinner ones look like they’re further into the, the painting.
Dean Mills: Well the, so the one down there, the last one I did, I titled it “Stay on the Trail” because there would be times in Maine, I’d be hiking and I’d get off the trail and it would be like, ‘Okay, this is not going well. This is bad like it’s starting to get dark and I can’t see what’s going on here.’
Wit López: Oh, that’s scary. (laughter)
Dean Mills: Anyway, so then this one. Yeah, I wanted the dark to look, like, scary, like, really, like, scary, creepy, and the white to be like, ‘Oh, yes, I’m safe.’ So, anyway, it was those, that remembering of, like, getting off the trail and thinking ‘oh my gosh, where am I going to end up?’ that helped me title that one.
Wit López: Yeah, I can, I can definitely see that, it does. The, uh, from here I can’t really tell what color, maybe like a navy blue sort of?
Dean Mills: The, oh! So it’s my favorite new color which I don’t think they have in oil paint. It’s called Payne’s Gray
Wit López: Pain’s Gray?
Dean Mills: P-A-Y-N-E Gray. And it’s the color that I use the most. So it’s a dark, dark, I would say a Prussian Blue is the closest thing in oil paint. So it’s a gray-blue, but it also can pick up a little bit of purple when it’s really thin. It’s a transparent encaustic color. So a lot of the paint I used in this show is transparent, not the white, the whites are all opaque. But I really wanted to try to maximize the transparency, and, in encaustic paint there, there’s opaque paint, there’s semi-transparent and there’s translucent or transparent. And this Payne’s Gray, yeah, this, the painting here, that’s all Payne’s Gray, so it becomes a little bit purple-ish, but it’s mostly just a dark, dark Prussion Blue. So I use that a lot.
Wit López: I love it.
Dean Mills: So in encaustic paints I discovered sort of some new colors that they, I am not aware of in oil painting. Um, yeah, and I, because if you use opaque encaustic paint, you lose that depth going in.
Wit López: Yes.
Dean Mills: I mean, you can get it a little bit by scraping, but I, I sort of focused on just the transparent encaustic paints for the show to really get to know them and understand them.
Wit López: No, it’s wonderful, and your use of the Payne’s Gray on “Stay on the Trail,” you called it?
Dean Mills: “Stay on the Trail.”
Wit López: “Stay on the Trail,” it adds depth and it adds mood to the trees. So you mentioned that you, it was a scary sort of feeling, and it lends itself to that, where you see like the peaks of like, light coming through but it’s obscured by the darkness of Payne’s Gray. So that’s, yeah, you really definitely captured that in that painting. That’s wonderful. So I had a question about the first one when you walk in, the first one on the left when you walk in. It’s, I believe, the smallest one that’s on display right now.
Dean Mills: So that one I did, it, so I took four different encaustic workshops, and that I did, I have to remember which workshop, I think it was a workshop in Portland, Oregon.
Wit López: Wow.
Dean Mills: And so the workshops, they want you to bring smaller wood panels because they just can’t accommodate these big ones. So, it started as a painting in the workshop, I can’t even really remember what it looks like, and then up in Maine, one day, I was just like, ‘okay, let’s have some fun.’ And I was looking at an artist, I think her name is Ingrid Ellison, she’s a Maine artist and I saw some of her work in a gallery in Blue Hill, loved it. And she does this checkerboard stuff, like, so the one behind you, she, she does, I mean her work is really amazing but it has these checkerboards in it that are not like real steady checkerboards. They’re kind of wavy, crazy checkerboards so I thought that was so cool, so I tried it. So I took the one I’d done in this workshop and just whatever was there as a base then put this checkerboard on top and liked it. So, um, it’s just kind of a little fun thing.
Wit López: No, it looks great. I love it and it looks like you use green, white, and black for that one in particular?
Dean Mills: Probably black. I’m not, I’d have to go look at it to know if it’s black or the Payne’s Gray, because the Payne’s Gray, if you use it, like, not diluted down it can be almost a black.
Wit López: Huh, okay.
Dean Mills: I use very little black because the black is opaque. I’ll use the darker blues and darker greens, um, pretty straight on for the darks.
Wit López: No, that’s wonderful, that’s really wonderful.
Dean Mills: I also like my experience with this gallery and this physical space. I don’t want the show to have paintings all the same size because I think you come in and just like plunk plunk plunk plunk. So, I like to change the size up because I just think it makes it more interesting, so I like the little one, you know, and then also the big ones. So I try to kind of mix up the rhythm.
Wit López: Absolutely. I feel like you’ve definitely done that not only with your curation in the space currently that I’m looking at, that you, you know, kind of mixed up that rhythm, but also within each painting. You’ve also done that too.
Dean Mills: It was, so, these were all painted, well, almost all, were painted up in the barn in Maine, and the barn is just like a natural wood interior. We haven’t painted the inside of the barn. So these were all hanging on sort of rough, natural wood, and so I haven’t seen them against white walls. And, in the barn, I have room to hang several but I haven’t, I don’t have the room to hate this many. So, I began to get a little anxious in November and December, like, not knowing how it’s going to come together as a show. I mean, that’s kind of fun to start, like I, I rented a truck and brought them all here from Maine and just stored them in the basement. And last night I brought them all up from the basement and just started sitting them around, and it’s exciting to see them all kind of together and in this more pure gallery space, not in, you know, the barn next to the woodpile and the, (laughter), you know, the kayaks and whatever else is in the barn, um. But I, I love that. I mean, that’s what I do in my home, like, moving art around, like, what looks good next to what, like, what’s talking to its neighbor, what’s talking across the gallery?
Wit López: Mmm.
Dean Mills: And this is sort of my best attempt at what I want to go where and then I have a friend, a fellow artist, coming this afternoon, who will give me her opinion, sort of a second opinion of, you know, maybe this one should go there or maybe, and, so I’ll see what she thinks about it. But yeah, that’s kind of the next layer of fun, is seeing how they work together and what, what in one painting sort of leads you to look at another painting.
Wit López: Absolutely, absolutely. And it definitely does. It definitely does. It feels like there’s a string that connects some of them to, to another through the form and through the use of the encaustic paint, so it’s, it’s really great. I really, really love this show, and I also look forward to any changes that might happen from what I’m witnessing now.
Dean Mills: Right! You’ll have to come back because after my friend’s here, we could totally change it up.
(laughter)
Wit López: Absolutely, so, I look forward to coming back and seeing what changes, if at all, if at all, but yeah, this is really, it’s really, really a beautiful show. I’m really, really excited for it. I think it’s a really great way to start the New Year. So, you know, if folks want to see a show that’s gonna have them thinking outside the box, they should definitely come see this show.
Dean Mills: Well, thank you!
Wit López: Absolutely come see it. It’s amazing.
Dean Mills: I love, I, you know, we’re, Muse is not a traditional gallery. It’s a cooperative gallery, which is a different, uh, just a different way to run a gallery. There’s no owner,
Wit López: Ohh, okay.
Dean Mills: So we’re a cooperative, we’re 22 artists, you’re asked to join and then you show for a month, um, every two years, you get a show month and it’s your month to do whatever you want with. So, in some ways, like a tenured professor. No one else in the gallery can tell you what to do with your art. We have to work together to run the gallery, um, you know, to figure out who’s sitting, how to clean the bathrooms, how to clean the floor, how to clean the windows, how to pay the bills, so we have to work together to do that. But your art is all yours.
Wit López: That’s wonderful.
Dean Mills: And I know I have a show coming every two years which is a good cycle for me to sort of plan for.
Wit López: Absolutely, absolutely.
Dean Mills: But anyway, it’s, yeah. It’s exciting to see it all here and I like showing in the winter. I like being in the city in the winter and, uh, hope we don’t have too many blizzards, but that’s okay. We can deal with them.
(laughter)
Wit López: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Deann, for joining me today on Artblog Radio.
Dean Mills: Thank you Wit! This has been lots of fun! I love talking about my work, so, you know, I want, it’s a cooperative gallery. Just come by, and I’d love to talk more about my work, so, thank you for this opportunity.
Wit López: Oh, no problem. Thank you for welcoming me into the space of Muse Gallery. So, you heard it here, folks. Come see Deann Mills’s show “Wonderland.” It’ll be here at Muse Gallery from January 1st, yes, the first of the year, New Year’s Day, through February 2nd, 2020. You can come here on Friday, January 3rd, to see it for First Friday. And if you want to attend an artist’s reception, that’s on Saturday, January 11th, from 1pm to 4pm. The gallery hours here are Wednesday through Sunday, 12 noon to 5pm. Make sure you make it through to Deann’s show. Thanks so much for listening. I’ll catch you next time. Bye y’all.
