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I started painting in encaustic in 2006. It has been both a challenging and a rewarding process, opening new creative doors.

The process of painting in encaustic entails heating up the paint – which is a combination of refined beeswax, resin and pigment – until the paint mixture melts, then quickly brushing the strokes of paint onto your painting surface before the wax hardens — which really takes no time at all. Usually, I can get only 1-3 strokes onto my surface before the wax solidifies. So, it’s dip and stroke, dip and stroke, over and over and over until you’ve covered at least a portion of the surface.

The layers have to then be fused together with heat to make the painting strong. There are several tools and methods for doing this; at present, I usually use a heat gun or a small butane torch — in many cases, remelting the wax. These tools blow out air along with the heat, thereby moving the paint around a little or a lot.

Here is where it gets tricky. You have to heat your painting at least enough to fuse the paint, but due to the air, the somewhat melted paint may also move around in unexpected and perhaps unwanted ways. You can ruin some beautiful passage of paint, or achieve some gorgeous effects. At any rate, working this way produces somewhat unpredictable and uncontrollable results.

The painting shown here, "Stoic Poppies in an Earthquake," is the fourth painting in my poppy series, and is one of my favorite examples of achieving some unplanned, yet quite beautiful, results.

This is partly why I love this medium so much. I have to be very Zen about my encaustic paintings; sometimes the biggest challenge is knowing when to stop working.