Fresco & Encaustic

Focusing on potential guides us through this painting process. We grow through cracks, fractures, and erosions. By letting go of what does not want to stay, we create space for the new and unexpected.

This workshop combines two antique painting techniques: encaustic and roman fresco. The different materials and methods complement each other and ensure they retain their own narrative and beauty. Emphasis will be placed on creating intonaco layers of pit lime and marble dust on different surfaces, provoking cracks and decay that we will reintegrate into our works. Instruction will focus on building paintings from the ground up, adding beautiful glazes of diluted inks and stains to highlight hidden cracks and fractures. Additional structures, marks, and colors will be created using encaustic paints, pigmentsticks and panpastells.

Bettina Egli Sennhauser is a visual artist born and living in Switzerland. She explores and experiments with natural materials: waxes, natural resins, stone powders, pit lime, sands, and pigments developing her abstract vocabulary and interpreting the ancient techniques of encaustic and fresco painting. Bettina is represented by the frontofbicycle Gallery in Basel, Switzerland. She is a member of the Swiss Association of Visual Female Artists (SGBK), the International Encaustic Association (IEA) and a Founding Member of the European Encaustic Artists Community (EEA).

Her work has been shown at several Group Exhibitions in Basel, at the ARTE Binningen, the Trevisan International Art Gallery in Bologna, Italy, the Juried Exhibitions of the International Encaustic Conference in Provincetown and the Atlantic Gallery in New York. In 2019 and 2020 she was awarded scholarships by the International Encaustic Association and the Truro Center of the Arts. In Europe she teaches Encaustic and Mixed Media workshops in her Encaustic studio “kunstfreiraum” in Switzerland as well as at various established Art Academies in Germany, Austria and Ireland.