What Makes Encaustic Different in Creating Color Effects

Join teaching artist Leslie Giuliani and R&F Handmade Paints Founder Richard Frumess for this 2-Day encaustic color intensive.

How encaustic affects the color of pigment differs greatly from how oil or acrylic or tempera affect the color. That difference is reflected in encaustic’s unique methods of how the paint is applied, how it is fused, layered, extended out, textured, and how it incorporates other materials.

This is an unusual approach to both encaustic painting technique and color theory. Emphasis is placed largely on understanding how encaustic employs the often-under-recognized power of a pigment’s translucency or opacity. The understanding of the opacity/translucency spectrum not only helps to resolve problems but also enriches the toolbox of expressive possibilities.

Leslie Giuliani has an eclectic artistic background. Having graduated with a B.F.A. in drawing and painting, she continued her studies in esoteric art forms including fresco painting, Byzantine icon painting, gold leaf conservation, non-silver photographic processes, primitive rug hooking, digital embroidery and encaustic painting. Working at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, CT, she has taught hybrid forms of printmaking focusing on its application in Encaustic painting. Currently, her work involves creating monotypes, embellishing them with Digital Embroidery and sewing the pieces together to form larger works.

Ms. Giuliani is the recipient of a 2008 Artist Fellowship Grant from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism for Craft and is the author of several published articles on rug hooking and cyanotype photography. Her work was included in the Farnsworth Museum’s show, “Beyond Rugs” and her work is in the permanent art collections of the Housatonic Museum of Art and the state of Connecticut. She has worked with well-known artists on special projects including the architect, Richard Meier and the Argentinian artist Liliana Porter.

Richard Frumess has been manufacturing artist paint commercially since 1982 when he began making encaustic paint for Torch Arts Supplies in New York City. In 1988 he founded R&F Handmade Paints and two years later developed Pigment Sticks, R&F’s brand of oil sticks. In the intervening years, he conducted a series of comprehensive tests on the properties of encaustic as well as doing research into its history and contemporary use. Withdrawing from the running of the company in 2014, allowed him the freedom to investigate the underlying principles of the color line that had been developed intuitively over the years by him and R&F’s staff. The workshops that have evolved from this exploration are intended to ground color theory in the materials of color itself.