17th International Encaustic Conference

Check in at the front table to let us know you're here and receive your Conference swag bag and name tag. 

Dive into the captivating world of skin papers with encaustic in this one-hour demo.
Discover how the ancient technique of encaustic painting, seamlessly melds with delicate, thin papers to produce mesmerizing art pieces. 
From understanding the fundamentals of encaustic painting and the allure of skin papers to delving into intricate processes and creative techniques, this conference offers a comprehensive exploration of this unique intersection of materials and methods.

This talk is a survey of artists who work with monotypes and encaustic in complex and personal ways. It will cover artists who make encaustic monotypes, artist who use monotypes in other mediums with encaustic, and artists who use their monotypes to make mixed media 2D or 3D work.

This talk will cover contemporary artists working with print installations and a brief history of print installation work.

New to the Conference?  Want to learn more? Stop by the lobby and Cherie will give you the rundown and answer any questions you may have.  

The way a painting is presented can make ALL the difference. Using simple tools, Ampersand Encausticbords and gorgeous R&F metallic paints, we can create a gilded frame to showcase our paintings. This is a wonderful technique that can really set your work apart.

In building knowledge in methods and process, one can achieve greater meaning in their creative work. This knowledge base can be further augmented by constantly looking at both contemporary and historical work which, in essence, plant the seeds of inspiration driving the creative process forward. Examples of work that provides this for my own artistic vision, keeping me in ‘experimentation mode,’ will be shared and discussed.

A map, like an artwork, is a tool for locating and understanding. Mapping your artist family is a powerful exercise to place your work with its contemporary relations. Placing your work in context can locate the constellations of discourses in your work, clarify important themes and ideas, find other artists engaged in related conversations, reveal the spaces where we need to up our game, map where those conversations are taking place, and help point us to a professional path for the work. This participatory talk will introduce the ideas of the Artist family, along with some fun exercises to build your family tree, and discover how to use mapping to support your studio and professional practice.

Join Isabelle on an engaging exploration into the captivating world of Encaustic painting during this demonstration. Uncover the core principles as you delve into its essence, creation process, and the essential materials and setup needed.With a touch of humor and simplicity, delve into the basic and intermediate techniques of encaustic painting. Embrace its spontaneity, weaving through texture and tones, while discovering the endless possibilities of layering.

In this demonstration, Isabelle will showcase:

•  Vital resources encompassing safety, ventilation, ideal working temperatures, and equipment management.
• Selection guidance for supports, palettes, brushes, colors, and studio organization.
• Immerse yourself in a variety of relief and textural methods, along with fusing techniques, including Isabelle's use of flat brushes for intricate textures.
• Unveil the secrets behind achieving smooth and textured surfaces, as well as mastering translucency and opacity.
• Embark on a journey of mark-making, exploring techniques like inscribing, etching, sgraffito, and scraping.

Are you working dimensionally and interested in shaping space with your work? Are you challenged and intrigued by site specific work and installation? This talk will feature artists who create sculpture and installation that utilize space to actively engage the viewer, and include insights into the evolution of the thinking process inherent in envisioning dimensional work in space. How these artists address space and use it as one of the elements integral to the success of the work itself, as well as consideration of scale, lighting, height, movement, placement and sound will be illustrated and addressed.

Petah Coyne is a contemporary sculptor and photographer best known for her large-scale hanging sculptures and floor installations. Working in innovative and disparate materials, her media has ranged from the organic to the ephemeral. Dead fish, mud, sticks, hay, black sand, specially-formulated and patented wax, satin ribbons, silk flowers, shaved cars, and shredded trailers are a few of the things she has incorporated into her sculptures. More recently, she has worked with glass, velvet, taxidermy, cast wax statuary, and trees. Unafraid to confront a range of subjects or tackle contemporary themes, Coyne’s innate dualities are transposed in the dichotomous themes of her work: transformation and constancy; life and loss; beauty and darkness. In a 2019 New York Times article by Hilarie Sheets, Amy Gilman, director at the Chazen Museum of Art adeptly describes Coyne’s sculptures as “evocative in the way that great literature stays with you… Petah’s work exposes private things without being explicit, these deep wells of memory and meaning and relationship.”
​Throughout her oeuvre Coyne has derived inspiration, as with her media, from diverse sources—from literature and film, world culture and the natural environment, to the artist’s own personal biography. Notably celebrated are under-recognized female authors and Eastern literary figures. Untitled #1379 (The Doctor’s Wife), 1997-2018, the centerpiece of Coyne’s 2018 solo exhibition in Having Gone I Will Return at Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, is titled after Sawako Ariyoshi’s novel of the same name. At 16 x 8 x 8 feet, this imposing installation piece is a mass of whorled folds of endless hand-sewn velvet, of inky blues, blacks, and teal. Most recently, Coyne has created Color of Heaven for the exhibition CRAZY: Madness in Contemporary Art at Chiostro del Bramante. This new body of work features nine hanging wax sculptures, all named after notable women, particularly artists and writers. In contrast with her large-scale black and white works, those featured in Color of Heaven are smaller in scale, and from underneath, they are brightly-colored. These works will be part of a much larger installation at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, slated to open in 2023.
​Coyne’s work is in numerous permanent museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Denver Art Museum, Denver; Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Finland; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada; Museum of Contemporary Art of Montreal, Canada. 
​Select awards include the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Award, The Rockefeller Foundation Award, three National Endowment for the Arts Awards, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, The Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, Asian Cultural Council Award, New York Foundation for the Arts Award, Anonymous Was A Woman Award, Augustus Saint-Gaudens Memorial Foundation Award, Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities Awards, the Art Matters Award, three Artists Space Awards, two International Association of Art Critics Awards, and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art Award in the Visual Arts.

Coyne has been reviewed by Aperture Magazine, Art in America, Artdaily, Artforum, Artnet, ARTnews Magazine, Artspace, Blouin Artinfo, BOMB Magazine, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, ELLE Italia, ELLE Taiwan, Frieze, Hyperallergic, Interior Design, Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, Newsday, Sculpture, Tema Celeste, The Boston Globe, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The San Francisco Examiner, The Times (London), The Wall Street Journal, Time Out New York, Village Voice, Vogue Magazine, and the Washington Post.
​Born in Oklahoma City in 1953, Coyne currently lives in New York and is represented by Galerie Lelong & Co., New York; and Nunu Fine Art, Taiwan.

This demo is designed to show the viewer how to use the manipulation of heat, specifically working cold, in order to expand the possibilities of encaustic printing. Manipulating the encaustic printmaking process to “compose cold” and then introduce heat in order to activate the paint and then print the image can assist the artist with registration, composition and give the printmaker precious time to build an image and think through their ideas before committing paper to paint.

This will be a demonstration of different ways to build a color harmony starting with just one color and seeing how far it can go just by itself before adding another color and methodically building up a rich palette.
The demonstration will be done with Pigment Sticks.

There are many kinds of curators and many ways to curate. If you’re thinking about curating, I’ve got strategies and ideas to inspire and encourage you.

This will be a talk about how I have incorporated suminagashi into my art practice, how it appeals to my natural interest in process, and working with the materials and forces of nature. The talk will branch out to include a bit about my residency experience on Rabbit Island, and how that opened up my way of thinking about suminagashi as almost collaborating with nature. I will also share a short video that shows my method of working on suminagashi in the wild.

Come swing by and check out the postcard sale!  All proceeds go towards scholarships for next year's conference.  
Book signings and more in the lobby too!

An in-house event, it's an opportunity for every conferee to show their work to their colleagues (and, as always, there is no fee for this). Just open your hotel room at the times noted below. Some artists create entire installations. Others approach the event more casually, placing work on their beds or on the furniture. If you don't have a room at the Inn, not to worry; you can set up in the lobby.

An in-house event, it's an opportunity for every conferee to show their work to their colleagues (and, as always, there is no fee for this). Just open your hotel room at the times noted below. Some artists create entire installations. Others approach the event more casually, placing work on their beds or on the furniture. If you don't have a room at the Inn, not to worry; you can set up in the lobby.

Color is often the first choice you make when starting a painting and how you use color can change the content and message of your artwork. In this demo, you’ll learn how to mix any color and why tone is the most important factor in matching a color as well as how to mix a diverse range of hues.  Painting with a limited palette will improve your color-mixing skills and confidence.  We will explore translucent and opaque hues and the wonderful advantages of painting with wax!

Your artwork is made, photographed, mounted or framed, and wired to hang, but are you press ready? This skill building session will provide tips, tools, and strategies that will help you organize media kits and websites,  provide compelling visuals, prepare for interviews, writing press releases and getting them read, and making a quality media lists to fit your needs. Timelines and processes will be shared, and cues to be warming up your e-mail list and social media fans months in advance.

I will introduce the participants to the myriad possibilities of working with paper, thread and wax. In addition, I will share mages or actual works that I have created using these materials and techniques, provide information about types of paper as well as vendors who provide a multitude of options. I will also showcase images and information about other artists who also poke, sew and dip, and review a few different types of stitches that I have found work well when sewing on and through paper. Issues around installation and exhibiting works on paper as well as shipping and storing paper works which are sewn and which incorporate encaustic will be covered.

This demo will address combining encaustic with various mediums. Incorporating acrylic paint, water color, India ink, powdered charcoal, stain block (house paint) are a few of the methods that will be demonstrated. 
Processes will include working with digitally printed imagery, monotype, and silkscreen prints, as well as other suitable collage materials. In addition to working on panels, alternative substrates (FoamCoat on foam panels, as well as encaustic and shellac on glass) will also be shown. The demo will address ways to manipulate images and to push the digital print into something unique. Mark making, re-assembling, distorting, and adding hand drawn elements will also be a focus of the presentation. Combining controlled “accidental” marks using India ink and alcohol on Japanese paper will be shown as an option for layering on top of, and underneath an image.

How do you keep track of your artwork when it is moving from storage, to exhibition, to gallery and back again? Artwork Archive is an inventory database system that helps to manage, organize and track artwork. This presentation provides a broad overview of the systems and features including how to set up viewing rooms, create public and private files, monitor proposals and deadlines, and improve your overall business efficiency.

Closing remarks from Cherie and participants.