Encaustic paintings made between about 2008 and 2012, the years I kept bees and started using beeswax as more than just an interest in nature – as a working material. Encaustic is an ancient technique, heated beeswax mixed with pigment and damar resin, dating back over 2,000 years, and I came to it after SEE, my very first installation where I covered every surface of a room in beeswax to explore how a bee experiences the world. Working with a wax I harvested myself alongside the plants I was already painting wove a loop I cared about.
Most of these are small panels, around 6×6 inches, worked from flowers, petals, and seed pods, moving between abstract color fields and more identifiable plant forms like Indian Paintbrush. Both Indian Paintbrush and Hibiscus, a nine-panel piece, measure 36×36 inches and sold to private collectors.
During this time I began incorporating a new pigment developed by OSU chemist Mas Subramanian into this work, which led to coverage in OSU’s magazine (2011), a feature as a contributing encaustic artist on the R&F Paints blog (2012), and later, mentions in the Huffington Post (2018).
