Welcome to Below the Surface blog.

As a way of introduction to New England Wax and our blog, we thought it would be best to answer the basic questions about encaustic painting as a medium and who we are as artists.

As artists, we love the honey-tinged scent of the bees wax as it slowly melts in our warming trays. We are drawn to the naturalness and the translucency of this ancient medium. We love to layer the wax with fabric, found objects and images and we love its physical flexibility. We love all of it.

But we are not exclusively about wax. We make art because we must. Because that is who we are, how we communicate with the world.  It is our passion.

We are professional artists – painters, yes, but also photographers, print makers, sculptors, and fiber artists. We work with metal, wood, canvas, clay, silk, oil, watercolor, pastel, oil stick and more. We create abstract and representational work. We work alone and collaboratively. Some of us have been working artists for as many as 50 years, others less than 10, but our goal on this blog is to share what is beyond the medium, and below the surface, to share our individual ideas and stories and how they brought us to where we are.

This blog will share our experiences as artists in New England, through member interviews, studio visits, exhibition reviews and techniques. We hope you will enjoy it. We encourage you to comment, provide feedback and interact with us on and off this blog.

We are connected through the encaustic medium, but we are also connected through a whole lot more; our passion to create art.  We are more than 30 professional artists living and working in New England, we are New England Wax.