Ever the versatile material, encaustic can be modeled, carved, cast, and applied to absorbent materials to build sculptural forms. The wax sculptures of today are often created by applying encaustic to absorbent materials such as wood, fiber, bisque fired clay, and paper mache. We checked in with artists Pamela Blum, Anna Wagner-Ott, and Susan Stover to get familiar with their evolving individual approaches and the techniques they are using to sculpt with encaustic today.

An encaustic pour offers you a quick and relatively easy way to get a smooth even surface. Our latest YouTube video demonstrates two ways to do pours - one that will create a thick surface and a pour-over that will create a flat, thinner surface. Check out the video link below and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any of our YouTube videos.

We continue our series on "Painting the Landscape" in conversation with artists Regina B. Quinn and Cherie Mittenthal. Their paintings share a common appreciation and close observation of the landscape they reside in. They capture the seasonal changes, weather changes, and events that shape land over time.

Don Maynard lives and works in Kingston, Ontario. His art practice includes painting, sculpture, and multi-media installations. Previous public art works include Stand of Birch, Archive and Fallen Star for the City of Ottawa and Wave for the City of Toronto. Maynard shows nationally and internationally. He is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and a Chalmers Fellowship. Previous solo exhibitions include Tidal Mass, and Franken Forest at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, and Franken Forest at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa.

Leigh Palmer received a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1966. He is the recipient of a MacDowell Colony Fellowship and has had numerous solo shows in New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. His paintings Interior with Three Pears and Striped Tablecloth with Two Apples, both oil on linen from 1983, are in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (gifts of the Sara Roby Foundation), and his work is in multiple corporate and private collections, including the National Museum of American Art, The New School for Social Research, and American Bank and Trust.

We've been watching the many ways artists have explored geometry with our materials, which came to light while researching for our newsletter on encaustic inlay. We spoke with two artists, Joe Celli and Penny Dell, about the application of geometric ideas in their encaustic work. Penny visits our studio regularly and works with collaged geometric patterns, often on paper. Joe inlays a multitude of translucent geometric shapes to build a dimensional surface in an almost cathartic experience.

Our latest YouTube video is a demo on how to clean your encaustic paintbrushes using R&F soy wax. Artists ask us what soy wax is for all the time. In this brief video, we share a few tips and easy to follow steps to help you get started.

Artist, author, and founder of the annual International Encaustic Conference, Joanne Mattera’s use of color is nuanced, rich, and deep. R&F is fortunate enough to have two paintings by Joanne in our permanent collection. In this conversation, we learned a bit more about Joanne’s relationship to color, the way she creates tension within her paintings, and how the element of surprise affects her work.

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.