Around the end of 2023, Marilyn’s encaustic paintings started creeping over the boundaries of her rectangular supports and becoming more sculptural. So she began making sculptures from sticks, bones, wax and plaster from images in her dreams, like little boats. She was also picking up wood chips and sticks and bits of pine cone and bones on our walks and putting them in a little canvas bag. Eventually she began drawing some of these small objects on scraps of old canvas that she had saved from when she painted large paintings. The images of sticks began to combine with the images from dreams and dolls, toys, and other items of childhood memorabilia, and a whole new body of work began to form. The old canvas took the ink in very interesting ways, which newer canvas does not do as well.

By now she has made over 300 of these drawings, and has run out of old canvas, so she may be coming to the end of this series. Who knows? She titles them by (roughly) consecutive numbering and signs them on the back. About 100 of them were shown at Ceres Gallery NYC and at the 2024 Outsider Art Fair (“OAF”) in NY, where they generated some interest, but no sales. Later, two of them sold at M. David & Co. in Brooklyn. Now 32 of the drawings are at Susie Nielsen’s “Farm Projects” Gallery in Wellfleet MA, where Susie says they are receiving “a lot of love”, but so far no sales. Pricing is difficult, as it is for all art. Prices were high at the OAF, which is a prestigious (and expensive) venue. Susie has priced them almost painfully low, but that is the current art market.

Here are a few of the selections at Farm Projects: