This week we place the spotlight on two artists working with encaustic and form in imaginative new ways. Adrian Arleo's impressive ceramic sculptures make use of the natural surface quality of wax. She combines the figure and natural imagery to create a kind of emotional and poetic power. Deborah Kapoor's process-driven work uses contemporary cultural markers to explore narratives related to spaces the body inhabits. Encaustic is often the catalyst for adding dimension and texture into an array of absorbent materials in her work.

Scraping is a technique many artists use with encaustic to reveal the history of layers and color in their painting. This demo video was inspired by R&F Tier Artist Lorraine Glessner who writes a wonderful blog called Art Bite. The tools featured in this demo video include a pear-shaped loop tool, a razor blade, and a wax scraper from Sculpture House.

Ask Richard is back! We chatted with R&F founder Richard Frumess about the burning question seemingly on everyone’s mind - Pigment Stick® drying times.

As your Pigment Sticks® begin to dry, a film of dried paint or "skin" will begin to cover areas exposed to oxygen. If you find a skin has formed on the surface of your stick, you can gently remove it with a paper towel or rag and Linseed oil, or the use of a razor blade. Below, you'll find the steps to remove this dried paint film and to maximize the workable paint within.

You will find in painting with Pigment Sticks® or encaustic that some colors are opaque while others are translucent. Opaque colors tend to be brighter and have a greater ability to hide underlying color and mark making. Translucent colors tend to be deeper and reveal the layer under it.

R&F is fortunate to have four pieces by Abby Goldstein in our permanent collection. We reached out to her to learn more about the encaustic work she did from 2009 to 2013 and how it relates to her other bodies of work.

In this blog post we look at the basic requirements of setting up your space for success. We will cover - materials & tools, ventilation, electrical requirements, and design.

We are often asked for the best way to store R&F paints. As with many of the technical questions we receive, there tends to be more than one correct answer depending on your needs. We checked in with the R&F Core Instructors to learn about some of the products (store-bought and custom-made) and methods they are using in their studios.

Artist Marina Thompson finds stimulation in “the pulse of color and the play of light and texture.” She describes her paintings as an effort to “generate depth, energy, and movement with illusions of volume, space, light, and time.” Marina might just have one of the most amusing pictures on the “About” tab of her website we’ve seen and we are thrilled to have her work Cross Purposes as part of the permanent collection at R&F.

We close the chapter on the third round of our People & Places series with a look at the East, Midwest, and an international artist. Marybeth Rothman is known for her fictional biographies and abstract narratives utilizing orphaned, vintage photographs, digital photography, encaustic and mixed media. She lives and works in New Jersey. Allison B. Cooke lives and works in Wisconsin, where she has been teaching at the college level for over three decades. Her paintings celebrate the interplay of past and present, imagined and tangible, that which is lost and what remains. Our international artist spotlight is on artist Belen Millan. Belen was born in Granada, and now splits her time between Malaga and New York. Her “dynamic abstractions” address the interconnections of science and nature from her own perspective as a Spanish-American artist.

Back by popular demand…another in our series of “Ask Richard” blog posts. We sat down (virtually, of course) with R&F founder Richard Frumess to learn a little bit more about the categories achromatic black, chromatic black, and chromatic white, and how we might apply these categories to our own painting practices.

Our third round of "People & Places" showcases a group of diverse and talented artists from the North, South, and West working with R&F Handmade Paints. In the North, we look at artist Cecile Chong. Chong is a multimedia artist who employs painting, sculpture, installation, and video in her practice. She layers materials, identities, histories, and languages throughout her work. In the South, we look at Brad Ellis's geometric, colorful, and abstract encaustic paintings. Ellis's imagery ranges from tightly rendered systematic patterns to loosely constructed, expressionistic compositions. In the West, we look at Flo Bartell. Bartell's methods excavate through layers and imagery to find the stories, scars, and symbols within. Bartell combines encaustic and mixed media in her work.

Artist Nancy Natale’s work is richly complex and unique. Her pieces explore color, geometry, and juxtaposition, “jostling the grid and setting one thing against another,” and often utilize unconventional materials such as rubber from inner tubes and upcycled handbags. R&F is delighted to have Place In The Sun as part of our permanent collection. We reached out to Nancy this week to hear how the last year has affected her practice and what she is currently working on.

After a long career in publishing, New York-based artist Melanie Hulse has turned from words to images. In her artwork, she tries to find the simplest, purest way to express something — to suggest as much as possible with as little as possible. She is deeply interested in the enigma of beauty and in the evidence trail left by numinous and scientific explorations of the world.

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.

Cuban born artist Humberto Fernandez lives and works in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. Trained as a filmmaker at NYU Film School, he has enjoyed a successful career spanning over 30 years in the advertising industry as a Photographer/ Cinematographer. Three years ago, he met with a friend and fellow photographer who had taken a workshop at R&F. She had been experimenting with images using encaustic on wood.

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.

Artists throughout history have responded visually and conceptually to the terrain and its ever-changing identity. The landscape reveals color, light, condition, culture, and much more. Landscape has been interpreted in many ways throughout history. At times capturing reality with varying degrees of the actual. In other periods giving recognition of a spiritual element, seen exemplified in Romanticism of the late 18th century.