Four encaustic artists

The idea for a quartet of solo shows at Sandy Carson Gallery (760 Santa Fe Drive, 303-573-8585, www.sandycarsongallery.com) began when owner Sandy Carson decided she wanted to mount an exhibit devoted to Toronto hotshot Tony Scherman, one of the foremost encaustic painters anywhere. Encaustic, by the way, is a wax-based paint that is colored using tints, powders or oil pigments. On canvas or panel, the encaustic has a surface that can only be described as — you guessed it — waxy. In order to fill her capacious facility, Carson added three other artists who also work in encaustic.

Scherman works the paint in a traditional way, and the pieces in Tony Scherman resemble oils or watercolors. He's also fairly old-fashioned, stylistically, with his compositions resembling updated takes on traditional representational painting.

More abstract but also based on depictions of actual people and things are the lyrical seaside paintings of bathers in the water that make up Cindy Stockton Moore. The artist, who hails from New York, is a newcomer to the gallery, having wandered in last year while she held an artist's residency in Breckenridge. Gallery director William Biety loved her figural abstractions, which are very reminiscent of the work of that mid-century figuration crowd — in particular, David Parks — and that's hardly faint praise.

There's a little neo-classicism and a dash of art deco in the vases and paintings of vases that make up Mark Rediske. This Seattle-based artist has a long-term relationship with the gallery, and his taste for encaustic made him a natural for inclusion here.

Finally there are the dot paintings that make up Tracey Adams, which showcases the work of an artist from Carmel, including "Revolution 21" (pictured), part of a large series of non-objective pieces she's done. Her muted colors and use of graphite give her work an airiness that's enhanced by the atmospheric quality of the wax-based pigments.

All four shows will come down on January 4.