Walking into Constance Williams Studio/Gallery in the River Arts District, the first thing you notice is the quality of the light. It streams in from the west-facing windows, warm, natural and pervasive, filling the room with a soothing presence. In some ways, the light is the secret to Williams’ success, both as an artist and gallery owner: she’s found a way to capture it in her paintings, letting her clients absorb it too.
Although she also works in clay sculpture, Williams has developed a reputation for her work in encaustic painting, a technique that combines molten beeswax, damar-tree resin and pigment to create a paint medium that both reflects and refracts light. “Encaustic doesn’t need to be lit,” explains Williams. “But, If you give it any light, it truly makes the most of it.”
While that concept may sound a bit abstract, it’s backed by solid chemistry. The pigment in oil and acrylic paints is suspended in opaque linseed oil or polymer, while in encaustic, it floats in transparent beeswax. That lets light bounce through it, creating a glow that’s appealing to the eye and warm to the touch. And touch it you may. When it’s hardened and “cured,” an encaustic surface has a “skin-like quality” that invites the hand, says Williams. Touching it won’t damage the surface — it will only create a more interesting patina.
Williams developed her encaustic technique after moving to Asheville and reinventing herself from successful greeting-card entrepreneur to equally successful working artist and gallery owner. Her studio is inside her gallery, open to the public every day. While those who visit may initially stop in to look at the completed pieces on display, they tend to linger to watch her at work. Who could resist the captivating sight of the artist wielding her blowtorch?
The torch is an important — and inspired — part of her process. Most encaustic artists use a heat gun, but Williams prefers the immediacy of the flame, which fuses the medium to prevent cracking. Once the surface has hardened, it can be cut, gouged or scraped (she uses clay tools for this) to create a textured effect, then fused once again. This process can be repeated over and over, building up layer after layer, each of which Williams treats almost as a new painting and sculptural surface. “I’ve really been evolving with encaustic, realizing what you can do with the layers and using light to the best advantage,” she says.
While Williams’ compositions fluctuate between representational landscapes and abstract arrangements, the many layers of encaustic add dimension to each piece. Selective building up and breaking down in different areas of the painting creates texture that draws the eye in. A gouge here, a uniform scrape across the surface there: covered by another layer of encaustic, the effect is mysterious. There seems always to be something new to discover just beneath the surface.
One of her strategies for creating that effect is saving bits of wax she’s carved or shaved out and reincorporating them later. She keeps a drawer full of these little wax “gems” on hand to lend color and texture between layers. Williams uses these accessories — and all her tools — intuitively, letting the process guide the outcome. At the same time, she knows how to plan for a larger piece: the nature of the medium demands that she move quickly while the surface is still fluid. That can be a physical as well as an artistic challenge — she’s worked on pieces as large as 8 feet by 5 feet. But Williams says experience has been a great teacher, and with encaustic, there’s really no such thing as a mistake, just new opportunities for texture and depth.
While some artists might be distracted by the interruptions of frequent visitors, Williams finds them inspiring. She never tires of introducing encaustic to those who’ve never seen or even heard of it before. “Some of my best work comes when I’m demonstrating to someone who has a lot of questions,” says Williams. “In the conversation, beautiful things can happen.”
Those conversations have led to a growing schedule of commissioned works. Clients who love the technique but aren’t sure what they want can choose a color, size and subject, using her past work as a jumping-off point. “It’s about really listening to what someone wants and needs in a painting,” she says.
Williams also takes clues from her peers (she’s president of a newly retooled association of River District artists), including those who share her studio space and show in her gallery: clay artists Fran Welch, Cassie Ryalls, Greg Vineyard and Jenny Mastin. “I feed off the energy here,” she says. “Witnessing other artists’ creativity makes me more passionate about my own work.”
Williams’ attitude really comes across in her gallery: it is a welcoming place where artists and art lovers alike tend to congregate and mingle. While the quality of the work is refined, the atmosphere is unintimidating. That ever-present light seems to have taken up residence here, not only in the art, but in the spirit of the place. And those who walk away with a new piece of artwork take a little of it with them.
Local Resources: Constance Williams Studio & Gallery – gallery