Encaustic Art Newsletter

For this section I'd like to highlight one of you each month. Please email me if you would like to be featured here. My newsletter reaches almost 800 Encaustic enthusiasts, who are all eager to learn more about you!

You just have to love the internet! How else would I have found out about this remarkable story of an Encaustic painting, which ended up in the home of Oscar winning actor Dustin Hoffman!

This month's featured artist is Hugh Wilson from Ontario.
He contacted me with a technical question about "bloom" and we exchanged a few emails. He apparently came to Encaustic via large chainsaw sculpturing and a stint in acrylics... Unfortunately he does not have a website yet, but I hope he will upload some of his paintings on the Ning Encaustic network.
I was very intrigued as he mentioned he placed one of his works in the US.

This is his story:

Having worked with Lisa Hoffman, wife of Dustin Hoffman, as a broadcast media consultant, a few things kept coming up! She is probably one of the nicest people I have ever met, Dustin is incredibly supportive of her work, and that they are so very giving and constantly send gifts to those they touch in life, those aspects of Lisa being very apparent, she was also very interested in art as our talks would wander from business to creating.

Kill Bear Pine, 12x24

After spending some time training Lisa, I could not get the fact out of my head that people were always ready to accept gifts from ''The Hoffmans'' but what do you give them? how do you pay it forward? with that in mind I set to work with a goal in mind...an encaustic piece that spoke with rich colours that she seemed to love, and a piece that could live in L.A. and truly be Canadian in tone and structure...so the Group of Seven feel has to be part of it!!

That said, about 6 months passed and I worked with Lisa again and was able present her with the piece, 12 x 24, titled Kill Bear Pine, encaustic on wood panel, a realistic size to take home in a suitcase wrapped in bubble wrap.

Lisa loved it, said Dustin would love it, and was thrilled with the rich encaustic color....and the smell of beeswax!!

Encaustic has really taken over my artistic life and much of it carries that Group of Seven look, as I was raised on the Group by a father who ran a print shop called Rouss Mann, that took over from the Grip company. Grip Ltd. employed famous Canadian painter Tom Thompson as a graphic artist in the early 1900's.
We even had original Thomson sketches in our house, which sadly went missing in '76 when my father passed.