AerieArt Gallery in Rehoboth to introduce beeswax artist during Mosaic Art Walk Oct. 1

Georgia Nassikas will greet visitors to AerieArt Gallery in Rehoboth during the Mosaic Second Saturday art walk from 6 to 9 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 13.  She will explain the ancient technique of encaustic painting.  In her work she combines beeswax from her own hives with pure pigments and damar resin to deconstruct the world she sees and experiences, sometimes in surprising ways.

“My inspiration,” says Nassikas, “is captured by a Navajo wind chant: ‘Remember what you have seen because everything forgotten returns to the circling winds’.”  With the use of the encaustic medium, Nassikas creates luminous pieces at the intersection of the natural and the abstract, accepting Yogi Berra’s advice: when coming to a fork in the road, take it.

Nassikas has participated in juried shows in Virginia, Rhode Island, Washington, D.C., New York and Maryland, and her paintings are in private and public collections throughout the United States, Europe, Greece, and Australia.

Nassikas was raised on the Rhode Island coast in the prominent Chafee family; her late father John was a secretary of the navy, United state senator and governor, and her brother Lincoln is Rhode Island’s current governor, and himself a former U.S. Senator.  She was classically trained in art and design in Boston and Florence, Italy and earned her undergraduate degree at Lake Forest College in Illinois, after a year of study abroad in Spain.  She works out of studios in New England and in Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., where her husband John practices law at Arnold & Porter. They are the parents of four children.

A tension between impression and representation enlivens the imagery of a Nassikas painting, and inspires the viewer to see, really see, the essential forms, lines, and colors in a landscape or object.  Echoing her art, Nassikas challenges us to scrape away our visual misperceptions, to add new layers of insight, and to reflect on the fine balance, at art’s best, of final composition.

AerieArt Gallery is open Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.,, and by appointment weekdays, 302-584-6402.