But there was something about the encaustic. It was quiet at first, whispering
and seductive. The spatial quality was so unique, a depth that I had never seen
before. The surface was so alluring it nearly begged for me to touch it. The
delicious colors were so intense, so saturated that they gave me goose bumps.
It even smelled good.
It wasn’t long before the dreams started. In them I was painting with this un
familiar medium as though I had been doing it forever. Then thoughts of the
medium started to creep into my waking hours. I began to wonder about how
I might interpret my imagery through wax, or if it was even possible. Most of
the encaustic paintings I had seen were abstracts, while my paintings definitely
were not. Always being one to follow intuitional impulses, I decided to take
a one day workshop covering the basics of encaustic painting. I figured that it
would be something like clothes shopping. I would love it until trying it on
and when it didn’t fit right I could easily put it down and walk away. But that
wasn’t what happened. It was intriguing, difficult, technically challenging, and
a little dangerous. I had to explore this more thoroughly!
I waited impatiently during the several weeks it took me to gather all the ma
terials needed to start this great adventure. At long last I was prepared to
paint, and the following six months were the most intense of my life. I became
obsessed with the medium. One moment I would be ecstatically high with
minor successes, and the next berating myself over my own clumsiness and
stupidity. I felt completely manic. My normal life patterns were disturbed. I
would forget to eat and my brain buzzed with color and problem solving when
I tried to sleep.
For the next two years I worked only in encaustic. This was a huge risk on my
part as it meant that I wasn’t painting with watercolor. Having earned a respectable reputation as a watercolor painter, I had to wonder if this was some
sort of attempt at self-sabotage. Was it a coincidence that not even one year
before I had been offered a solo show at the Triton Museum of Art in Santa
Clara, California; a museum that I had admired for years?And that the work
they were interested in had all been painted in watercolor? How could I even
consider exploring a new medium at this stage of the game?