Finding faces so much fun , I then turned to a series of 3 faces drawn with oil pastel on poured encaustic . I loved their wrinkles and statements of time and personality . I experimented with how to make paintings of faces using encaustic . Stella was first . She was beautiful but I discovered the blow torch had a way of doing face “ unlifts ” to my work if I didn ’ t learn to use a lighter touch . I still find her a character that causes one to study her for the mysteries that are just beyond the surface . I tried it again , this time by working on a very active poured surface and embedding in it the wonderful Face of a Woman . I learned the excitement came in not trying to make the faces realistic and perfect , that a background was simply an abstract , in the way Nicolai Fechin painted his backgrounds . That took me out of my conventional thinking and into a new realm of work .