Sandrine Kern French-American

French-American artist Sandrine Kern builds up the thick surfaces of her paintings with a unique wax technique similar to encaustic. Instead of utilizing hot wax in her process, Kern combines oil sticks, oil paint, and cold wax to create a creamy, rich surface texture. She further manipulates the surface by scraping away layers with a knife and solvents.

Kern places importance on the mood of each work by highlighting the surface luminosity through her use of a high-contrast colour palette. The abstracted representation of each natural element she depicts is void of details that define a specific tree, or a specific location. Instead, the paintings convey the essence of form but are still recognizably landscapes. She draws on memory and imagination to create these serene waterscapes. For Kern, each painting represents the mood of a past moment and contains a certain freedom of motion which keeps the work from appearing static.