board members from Texas Wax were incorporated into the Board of IEA and took on duties to smooth the transition between the two groups and to provide volunteer service to help with the huge influx of additional members.
Since Texas Wax/SA was already in the preliminary planning stages for hosting a regional conference in San Antonio in 2012, the now IEA Texas Wax/SA chapter took on the responsibility of organizing the annual IEA retreat. This move of the event outside of California and the Northwest was in sync with an increasingly greater national and international IEA presence and signaled a major change in the organization. To reflect its changing identity, the IEA board adopted a traditional conference structure for its annual gathering and renamed it IEA encaustiCon®. With the conference coming to Texas and bringing with it fellow artists from Canada, Mexico and all parts of the US, Texas Wax came full circle in its transformation.
A Post Script….
As I said at the opening of the article, three pillars of a strong organization are good leadership, a strong sense of volunteerism and a built in path to growing the organization. As I look back on the history of Texas Wax, I am struck by how important a role R&F has played in the growing our Texas encaustic community. Unlike other professional arts organizations whose members study such disciplines as watercolor or sculpture then join corresponding professional organizations, most of us who now work in wax were not exposed to the medium in our BFA or MFA programs. We have had to rely on the pioneers among us who stumbled “into” encaustic and then seek knowledge from books or from paint makers. Early on, Richard Frumess of R&F Paint realized that an educational component was integral to the business. In talking to the artists for