Artist Statement

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I grew up studying traditional European easel painting with oils, and outside of classes, I tried other media: acrylic, watercolors, ink, charcoal, pastels, and photography. They are all interesting to me, but when I discovered encaustic, I felt like I had found my home.   I’ve had to take an autodidactic approach to encaustic because I couldn’t find anyone in Spain to teach it in person, and I have learned from online videos, attending workshops when I’m in the US, and trial and error in the studio. Part of the appeal of encaustic was that I could mix in so many of the other media that I experimented with, like a big tent with a lot of room underneath.

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In the past century, where the artistic idea has become increasingly separated from the medium, I love the fact that encaustic is stubbornly, joyfully, inherently tactile.  I work with textured abstraction, and with the landscape and flora, often in combination. One of my pieces can begin as a process, building accretions, which suggest topography, and then there is an improvisational pivot towards snow in a forest.  Or a buildup of flat and soft translucent layers can allude to a vast field.  When I’m looking at a landscape, I imagine how the wax can emulate that view. And I keep returning to the wonderful smell of beeswax, the warmth and the soft touch of the surface, the sound of the blowtorch, and the light running through layers of wax.  The act of making art with encaustic– the development of my personal formula of organic forms, textures, marks, and lines– keeps me in the present moment.  It is healing, revitalizing, often frustrating, and wonderfully challenging.  And that too becomes a part of the subject matter, a sensibility that I hope to impart to the viewer.

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In the course of showing art, I have enjoyed talking to people about the language of encaustic, to see them engaged by planes of color, combinations of translucency and opacity, and layers that are hidden and revealed.  Where art has a tendency to become glanceable and scrollable, encaustic has materiality, it pulls the viewer in.  Encaustic has a broad reach; when I teach workshops, I am pleasantly surprised by the diverse backgrounds of people attending. One recent workshop, for example, was attended by a mosaic artist, a chef, and a high school science teacher.  Encaustic has brought a lot of joy into my life, and I am developing courses to teach online and in person so I can pass that to others.