For good reason, artists are often concerned about shipping or transporting works in encaustic. Encaustic in extreme situations is vulnerable to cracking, chipping, flaking, or softening (or worse, melting). This is especially true when the shipment or transportation is done in extremely hot or very cold temperature conditions.

This week we return to our Ask Richard series to take a deeper dive into all things Pigment Stick® with founder Richard Frumess. For those of you that haven’t experienced the magic and immediacy of working with them, R&F Pigment Sticks® are oil paint with just enough wax to be molded into stick form.

One of the beautiful qualities of working with encaustic is its malleability. There are so many things you can do with it. Carve it, pour it, layer it, paint with it, cast it, transfer images on it, really - you name it. This week we share a technique that uses fresh leaves as stencils. As you will see in the video below by R&F instructor Dietlind Vander Schaaf, this is an easy and fun way to capture some of the beauty around you this summer.

Jodi Reeb has been a full-time artist and teacher for over 23 years. She lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Jodi teaches printmaking, acrylic, and encaustic painting, as well as book arts. Her artwork has been shown nationally, received numerous awards, and is in many private and corporate collections. She is the recipient a the Minnesota State Arts Board Grant in 2018. Jodi received a Bachelor's Degree in Fine Arts from Minneapolis College of Art & Design (MCAD), where she taught printmaking for over 9 years.

How are artists using encaustic inlay? We chatted with a few of our instructors to see just how they are making use of inlaid design, pattern, and material in their encaustic works and through their teaching practices. Below you will find responses from Dietlind Vander Schaaf, Kelly McGrath, and Lorraine Glessner. One thing is certain, there are many ways to take advantage and even reinvent this age-old technique.

Painter. Printmaker. Sculptor. Prop Maker. Videographer. Musician. Wayne's skills are abundant but it's his examination of art and life we've been taken by. Wayne received a BFA in Sculpture from the School of Visual Arts. His work has been widely exhibited and he has been an Artist-in-Residence at the Frans Masereel Center in Belgium, the Vermont Studio Center, Women’s Studio Workshop, the John Michael Kohler Arts in Industry Program, and the Awagami Paper Factory in Tokushima, Japan. We've known Wayne for a long time and are grateful he's part of the R&F family.

This week we look at artist Leslie Giuliani's boldly colorful and playful mixed media paintings and check in to see how she is staying creative during COVID 19. Leslie has been an art instructor for over 25 years and works with a range of media from egg tempera to encaustic and digital embroidery. She teaches privately, at arts centers, colleges, and museums as well as here at R&F. Leslie’s work has been featured in two international encaustic biennial exhibitions. In 2008, she was the recipient of an Artist Fellowship Grant from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism.

In our newest blog series, we chat with founder Richard Frumess to uncover answers to your burning questions about all things R&F. For our inaugural post, the spotlight is on encaustic gesso. R&F developed encaustic gesso in order to provide a ready-made white ground that was porous enough for encaustic to adhere to. With its granular surface, encaustic gesso absorbs and holds encaustic paint exceptionally well.

One of the few contemporary artists tackling representational subjects in encaustic, Kevin Frank’s paintings are breathtakingly precise. The sort of paintings that stop you in your tracks wondering, “how did he do that?” An artist equally skilled at rendering his subjects in both oil and encaustic, Kevin has four distinct bodies of work that include still life, landscape, portraits, and figurines.

Richard Purdy’s sensational painting Tulipifera hangs just to the left when you walk in the front doors at R&F Handmade Paints. When we reached out to Richard to learn more about the piece, he shared that it was based on a 3D rendering he did approximating Georg Cantor’s “Devils Staircase” - an infinite set between zero and one. He was introduced to this form from the Cantor function in Manfred Schroeder’s 1991 book Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws - Minutes from an Infinite Paradise.

Artist Cat Crotchett has taught painting at the Gwen Frostic School of Art at Western Michigan University for over twenty-five years. She believes her teaching practice helps to keep her creativity active and notes that her school is fortunate enough to have two mobile encaustic carts, which allows her to expose undergraduate students to encaustic painting.

If you’ve had the opportunity to visit R&F Handmade Paints in Kingston, New York during the last two years, chances are you’ve seen R&F Core Instructor Lisa Pressman’s stunning piece Talking, which hangs just to the left of the entrance to production. A native of New Jersey, Pressman received her BA in fine art from Douglass College, Rutgers University and her MFA in painting from Bard College. She has been exhibiting in solo and group exhibitions since 1981 and her work is in numerous private and public collections. Pressman embraces “materials, touch, and their interplay as driving forces” to produce paintings that embody “a visual synthesis of stored memory.”

In 2017, Carol Bajen-Gahm was part of THE LAST PICTURE SHOW: FORCES & artifacts, a two-person exhibition with Pamela Blum at R&F. Root Cellar Meditation #12 was part of this exhibition and was later acquired for R&F’s permanent collection. Highly influenced by the natural world, Bajen-Gahm’s work investigates time shifts, spatial juxtapositions, and the disordered aspects of nature. She has long been attracted to dark spaces, such as tangled roots, wells, and caves, as well as dreams and fairy tales.

The second in our “From The Collection” series is Unfolded #3 by artist Lynette Haggard. One of several pieces from Lynette’s 2015 solo exhibition at R&F, Frames of Reference, Unfolded #3 is an exploration of the structure within a grid, as well as the grid’s relationship to a light and indeterminate space.

If you’ve been to R&F for a workshop or tour, you might have noticed we have quite an impressive collection of paintings. This piece by artist Rifka Angel, Sonja or Remembering Dostoyevsky’s Literature, 13” x 10”, encaustic on panel, date unknown, is one of our oldest. Though Karl Zerbe, the German painter who served as chair for the Boston Museum School’s painting department in the 1930s and 40s is widely credited for his work with encaustic, Rifka Angel preceded him by several years. Angel began working with encaustic in the early 1930s and continued doing so until her death in 1988.