- Randy L Purcell
- Knoxville's Riviera
- Encaustic medium, ink transfer on beeswax
- 30 x 24 x 1.5 in (76.2 x 60.96 x 3.81 cm)
- Inv: 2526
- $2,500
Regal Riviera has always been one of Knoxville’s brightest landmarks, but for me, it was the angle that caught my eye before anything else. I was drawn to the way the lines converged—how the marquee, the neon, and the brickwork all pushed toward a single point, almost as if the building was pulling you in.
That tension between geometry and glow is what made this piece so fun to create. Working with ink transfer on beeswax let me build the surface like a mosaic—color by color, fragment by fragment—reconstructing the theater’s energy through texture and tiny bits of type. The warm oranges, bold reds, and dark shadows gave me plenty to play with.
There’s no big story behind this one. Sometimes a place speaks for itself. Sometimes all it takes is the right angle to remind you why a building becomes a landmark in the first place.
- Subject Matter: architecture