Sylvia Benson is a university watercolor professor from Mahtomedi, MN, who fell in love with encaustic.  Although most of her artistic work was in watercolor, there was a spontaneous nature to encaustic that is unpredictable and this attracted her to the adventure of working with hot wax.

“For Me, encaustic art is the most exciting art form I have ever encountered.  Getting the molten wax to flow until it reaches that precise point when you have the design you want and stopping the heat flow so this image is incredibly frozen forever in time. From here the allure of encaustic lies in the endless possibilities to further the piece.  It can be worked in 2D or 3D. Prints, pictures, handmade papers, and beads can be embedded in the wax for collages.  Wax can be built up in layers, and then incised in relief with sculpting tools to reveal the different colors in your designs.”

Sylvia spent a week in Govern, France in 2005 painting Monet’s garden.  At this time, she met an encaustic artist from North Carolina.  Later, Sylvia went there to study and learn the methods of working encaustic.  Falling in love with this medium, further study in Alaska and Carmel, CA was pursued which added more knowledge and technique.

Encaustic comes from the Greek word, encaustikos, meaning "to heat" or "to burn" refers to the method of painting with molten wax. Modern methods of working encaustic use electric griddle, hot irons, hot air guns and tools for carving, scribing, and scraping to alter the wax in any stage of the creative process. The molten wax is purified, natural beeswax, with damar resin crystals to harden the wax. This medium can be used alone or colored with pigments. It is usually brushed on the substrate(wood, clayboard, tile) surface but can be poured, drizzled, or dripped.