Artist Spotlight: Givan Lötz

Givan Lötz is a South African artist whose work references places of emotional resonance as a search for enchantment in natural terrain. His work manipulates the capacity for paint to render organic forms and natural cycles of growth and decay. Givan has recently exhibited at the Association For Visual Arts in Cape town, South Africa, and Hazard Contemporary in Johannesburg, South Africa. Givan attended the 2018 spring session at RESIDENCY 108 in Germantown, New York and soon discovered R&F Handmade Paints.

"In May of 2018, I travelled from South Africa to Germantown, New York to attend a month long residency at Residency 108. I had a pre-defined goal of making mono-print drawings informed by the charged natural surrounding. I needed the right material and came across R&F Handmade Paints. I quickly realized they were but a short drive away from Germantown, in Kingston across the river. Moreover, I noticed an upcoming workshop for encaustic wax painting on their website and signed up immediately, enthusiastic about a medium I had never even heard of before.

As soon as I started using encaustic during the workshop, I recognized everything I was trying to achieve in my oil painting experiments could be accomplished with encaustic. I’m interested in how paint can, in certain instances, act as a trace of the physics of the world, of nature. In the entirely physical process of melting, cooling, burning-in and scraping involved in the encaustic approach, the patterns of the physical world emerge naturally, a painting acting like a petri-dish, a small simulation of the real world, a small gestural trace of a larger expanse.

On returning to South Africa, I ordered a batch of R&F encaustic medium as well as a handful of colors and set out to create large scale encaustic paintings. The results became Unearthly and since then, I’ve been working almost exclusively with encaustic whether it’s for paintings or new mono-prints on paper."