Joanne Mattera paints in a style that is chromatically resonant and compositionally reductive. "I refer to it only partly tongue in cheek as lush minimalism," she says.

Each painting in her ongoing series, Silk Road, is a small, luminous color field constructed with layers of translucent wax paint. The series, which she began in 2005 and has worked on for some part of each year since, was inspired by the shimmery quality of iridescent silk, hence the title, but has evolved into more expansive explorations of hue and surface. "In plying a richness of paint against a limited palette, I try to set in motion a small-scale dynamic in which more and less jostle for primacy," says Mattera. Working serially allows her to develop a number of chromatic ideas, each discrete, which converse well in groupings and grids.

Over the course of a 40-year career, Joanne has expanded her practice to include writing and curating. She is the author of The Art of Encaustic Painting, the 2001 book that helped define a medium and create a community, and the ongoing Joanne Mattera Art Blog, in which she reports on art in New York City, the Miami art fairs, and elsewhere.

Mattera earned a BFA in Painting from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, and an MA in Visual Arts from Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont. She is the author of The Art of Encaustic Painting; Contemporary Expression in an Ancient Medium, which has become the standard reference on the subject. Her work is in the collections of The Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ, Connecticut College, Print Collection, New London, CT, University Libraries Collection, State University of New York at Albany, U.S. Embassies, Slovenia and Poland, and the Consulate of Brunei, among others. Her extensive bibliography includes approximately one-hundred books, periodicals, catalogs, essays and online reviews. Joanne is a newly elected member of American Abstract Artists, an organization founded in 1936 in New York City to promote and foster the understanding of abstract and non-objective art. She lives and works in New York City and Salem, Massachusetts.

Top Image: Joanne Mattera, Silk Road 446, encaustic on wood panel, 12" x 12"