The Lowe Challenge Series:

God of Flowers, Physics and Chemistry

On June 1^st, 2004, Daniel Kaufman received an e-mail from a prominent art dealer who had seen and admired Daniel's encaustic work but felt the need to show his collectors much larger paintings than Daniel was accustomed to making.  So in this fateful e-mail, which Daniel credits for the birth of this "signature" series, Bill Lowe, with galleries in Santa Monica and Atlanta, challenged Daniel to create "a body of works exhibition ready"  all 36" x 48" to be completed and delivered to the gallery by June 15^th!

Daniel's friends and supporters mobilized, bringing supplies, masonite, huge boxes of crayons, sanding, gessoing and preparing the surfaces upon which Daniel would melt thousands of crayons to create a body of work, cradled and ready to hang in fourteen days.  As Daniel worked with passion and joy on this series he was amazed and moved by how the laws of physics and chemistry would turn the so-called "children's crayons" in the presence of one thousand degrees  of heat into gorgeous gardens of nearly representational flowers.

And thus the title of this Series of twenty paintings came to be: 

The Lowe Challenge Series: God of Flowers, Physics and Chemistry.