Ann Arbor painter and mixed media artist Graceann Warn will show her art at SOFA Chicago 2009, a major international art fair, Nov. 6-8. Artists must be invited by a participating gallery to take part in the event, and Warn was thrilled when Kaiser Suidan, the owner of Next Step Studios in Ferndale, walked up to her at a fair in Baltimore and asked her to join nine other artists in his booth.

“SOFA is a magic word. It is a great audience of international collectors that I can’t get to by myself,” the artist says.

Warn is bringing a new set of works to the SOFA Chicago that evidence her recent artistic interests and use of materials. The artworks include large five- by six-foot encaustic and mixed-media paintings on wood panels, as well as a series of 10-by-10-inch tiles. The artist uses beeswax, pigment, paper and found objects together in order to create paintings that are “very textured, with lots of layers and depth to them,” she says.

Her discovery of encaustic in recent years has helped her fulfill a career-long desire to find a personal painting style. After years of working in assemblage, encaustic painting has allowed her to take her art in new directions. Warn explains, “I’m very respectful of the material. I don’t like it to be goopy and gorpy. I like a nice, smooth surface that allows me to see layers and layers beneath the surface. I think of looking down on the ocean on a clear day, and you can see layers of things going on. That’s what a great encaustic painting reminds me of, the depth that’s under that just goes and goes forever,” Warn says.

Every element of the work is meaningful to Warn on a sensory or emotional level, and the associations she makes between colors, objects, materials, emotions, words and ideas are exaggerated by her synesthesia. As a synesthete, Warn’s neurology creates strong associations between numbers and colors, or objects and emotions. For example, “The number four is always red,” for her.

“I didn’t know what it was until three or four years ago. That’s just the way I’ve been all my life. I see color and I get flavors in my head. My reactions are super strong to certain stimuli. It makes it easy for me to come up with a palette of objects, images or colors that I want to use that work for me,” she explains. Although she doesn’t expect others to have the same sensory or emotional response, her artistic process leaves behind “little hints” that allow the viewer to create their own stories, associations, and meanings.

Looking back, “When I first started 20 years ago, I made assemblages out of found objects. I wasn’t doing any painting at all. I was finding objects and letting them dictate what the work would be about,” Warn says. She “loved finding these old, funky things and then transforming them into something else. Warns early interest in assemblage was heavily influenced by artist Joseph Cornell, because when she first saw his work “something happened. I knew that I wanted to do my own version of that kind of work.”

However, “the whole time I was doing assemblage, I always wanted to be a painter,” she says. At first, she found painting “tricky” because “I didn’t want to be derivative of someone else. I just waited it out. I figured, if the time comes when I get older and have more experience of the world, I would figure out what my painting would look like,” she explains.

A few years ago, Warn traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico and discovered “a bunch of contemporary artists down there using encaustic,” she explains. She also remembers being intrigued by the encaustic surfaces of Jasper Johns’ mixed media paintings at the MoMA, years ago, although she did not know what the materials was at the time. After years of searching for a painting style, Warn had finally found a material that allowed her to develop one without forfeiting the themes she had developed working in assemblage over the years.

“Objects were so literal that there wasn’t a lot of wiggle room around it for me. The objects I used (in early assemblage works) pretty much tell you what they want to say. So the challenge that I gave myself was, can you create work that does all the things you want it to do without using the objects, or editing down your use of objects,” she explains. Now, her encaustic paintings include less found objects, and when she does throw them in “it is more about their texture, line, and creating drama in the work,” she says. “They are hints, hidden,” under a “translucent, rather than transparent surface,” Warn explains.

Her most recent large-scale encaustic paintings are partly inspired by photographs of walls that Warn has taken on her travels, as well as other flat surfaces like chalkboards, which “give me a structure to work within. Then it’s within the layers of stuff that I play with little bits of text or things that may give you a clue to something, or maybe not. It could also be a very Dada kind of thing, where I’m putting things together that make no sense, just for the pure folly of it,” she says.

Even when Warn is in a Dada mood, she still reacts to her senses and emotional reaction to colors, materials and objects throughout the course of her artistic process. Warn explains that she may choose to use a piece of wire to add drama and line to the work, a very formal decision, but in the same gesture “the use of a wire has such a melancholy feel,” she says. “When you are traveling out west and you see telephone wires across the sky, that is just heartbreaking to me somehow. That’s the thought in my head. Using the an old piece of wire makes me think, lonely,” according to Warn.

On top of her participation in SOFA Chicago, Warn will also be featured in a show produced by Architectural Digest in March of 2010, and she is planning a trip to Washington, DC for a show she does annually in order to connect with some of her regular collectors. She is excited to share her new work with new and old collectors alike.

Jennifer Eberbach is a free-lance writer who covers art for AnnArbor.com.