dana brown

Dana Brown was a watercolor painter for more than 20 years before she decided to try a new medium: encaustic.

In late night sessions, she experimented with wax on various surfaces, with different tools, often splattering it on the carpet, ceiling – even the cat. After a couple of fruitful years, the North Carolina artist knew she made the right choice.

Artist: Born in Montgomery, AL, Brown grew up in the greater Huntsville area. She studied watercolor privately, working with Chuck Long in Huntsville.

From there, Brown took workshops at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Tennessee, studied watercolor with private teachers and began to travel to juried art shows. In the early 2000’s, her curiosity about wax led her to explore encaustic.

Company/studio: Dana Brown is based in Topsail, NC, where she moved to in 2017.

Her studio is located in a designated space attached to her home, which includes an indoor studio for her encaustic and ceramics work. There is also a screened porch, where she displays ceramics, stores supplies and handles shipping. It is also where her two studio cats hang out.

Art & materials: Encaustic painting, also known as hot-wax painting on woodboard. ($750 to $2,500). Themes include structural subjects, including architecture, railroads and heavy equipment, and the light and shadows found in them

Newer themes include botanicals, discovered while kayaking on North Carolina creeks and rivers.

Why encaustic: I love the nature of the wax, the smell, the way pigmented waxes blend and repel each other – and the way it lends itself to my chosen subjects, said Brown.

Favorite tools: Varied. But can’t do without her griddles, electric skillet and hake brushes.

Inspirations/influences:

Structures, such as old doorways, windows and porches.
Trains, tractors and farm equipment.
Engines, fuel pumps and hoses.
Artist Jasper Johns, whose work she admired before she understood it. Then Brown came across a photo of the Georgia-born artist in front of a painting with a house painter’s brush in one hand and a saucepan of wax in the other. That was it.

Process:

Begins with a medium of beeswax and damar resin. She makes her medium in large batches and has adapted a standard recipe to suit her needs.
Then adds pigment using oil paint, keeping the proportions appropriate for workability.
With griddles to her right that are loaded with pans of pigmented medium, she works on maple board which rests on a raised metal cooling rack – so the wax can drip off the edges as needed. Drippy edges seem only right, said Brown.
Uses carving tools designed for ceramists to cut into the wax and create areas to be filled with pigment.
Paints with hake brushes, loading them at the griddles and dripping her way to the board. (It’s messy but it works!)
With safety an uppermost concern, Brown closely monitors temperatures and ventilation while working surrounded by hot surfaces and pans of hot wax.

Recent exhibitions: