Painter’s encaustic panels tell a complicated story
Sarah St. Laurent.
Portrait by Clark Hodgin
Every artwork carries within it a history of its creation. But in the case of encaustic, the near past is layered almost in plain sight. That volatile mix of wax, resin, and paint attracted Asheville artist Sarah St. Laurent during a workshop 13 years ago in her native Texas.
“This was a medium where I could combine other art forms I was already working in,” says St. Laurent. “I can create traditional paintings or I can dye, print, and embroider on textiles to be used within the wax. I recently started applying wax to ceramic houses that I hand build.”
Taking inspiration from the textile-based encaustics of Daniella Woolf and the mixed-media art of Michelle Belto, St. Laurent incorporates fabric, metal, wood, and photography — her own, and also the images of her photographer husband Chuck St. Laurent — to create pieces that make the most of encaustic’s nearly three-dimensional quality. She implements the technique in a variety of genres, from landscape to collage, in a process that requires not only an artistic eye but also a constructor’s planning savvy. “With encaustic, wax is laid down in layers, and as I apply the wax and other elements, I really do feel like I’m building the painting,” she says. “When I envision a piece, I need to decide in what order those layers will be painted.”
Her “Rust and Blue” series, for example, consists of highly complex strata of dyed fabrics with wax, mounted on steel mesh frames. Particularly striking is the “Flight Lines” collection, where she melds photography, landscape-inspired underpainting, and incised lines and shapes on cradled wood panels. St. Laurent begins with a foundation of pigmented and heated beeswax, and then, “several layers in, I create texture on the wax surface and use an oil-pigment stick to highlight the texture,” she explains. The lines, added next, are inspired by the flight paths of birds or bees; she fills them in with oil paint to add depth.
“When I have the background where I want it, I transfer a Xerox copy of a photographic image onto the wax. Then I fuse it and add a final coating of wax to encapsulate the image.”
Many of the poignant panels recall the elegiac nature studies of the Hudson River School, autumnal in their muted palettes of greens and browns; others remind the viewer of the spareness of traditional Japanese ink paintings, tree branches starkly outlined against the sky.
In addition to encaustic, St. Laurent has also been a silversmith and a potter. She recently completed a course in textile dyes, which she plans to apply to her future creations in encaustic. “Making art with a medium that’s not well known can be a challenge as well as a boon,” she says. “I spend a lot of time educating visitors [at Wedge in the River Arts District]. But escaping to my studio allows me to savor the smell of the beeswax and the flow created between the torch and the wax. Fire and heat have been a recurring theme in my art quest.”
Sarah St. Laurent, Wedge Studios, 129 Roberts St., 1st Floor (in Asheville’s River Arts District). For more information, call 512-656-3731 or see stlaurentart.com.