Carol Aaron

Although Carol has dabbled in metal sculpture, she has primarily worked in photography and acrylics for most of her art life. Carol remembers seeing an encaustic demo for the first time and falling in love with the medium. Carol moved away from Austin shortly after her infatuation started and began using all of her time in Baltimore to learn everything she could on how to paint with wax. After much trial, error, and enlightened mistakes she began to understand the medium and how she wanted to use it. For fifteen years now, Carol has exclusively worked with encaustics.

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Carol's work has been shown in stores and galleries all over the nation from Maryland to California. Carol is now back home in Austin for good and is still learning and inventing new ways to create with encaustics. Carol has a lovely studio in North Austin where she paints, teaches private classes, and wonders why she would ever leave Austin in the first place.

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About encaustics: Encaustic is the medium and process of painting with melted wax and pigment. The Greek word literally means "to burn in", referring to the heat fusing it requires.

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In her art, Carol has adapted the process in order to impact the earth as minimally as possible. She paints on cradled wood from a sustainable forest with an encaustic medium she makes in her studio. It is a clear, molten combination of filtered beeswax with tree resin added for hardening and temperature stability. Carol adds pigments into heated tins of the medium to color it and proceeds to paint, fusing each layer with fire from a torch. As she builds up texture and color (which includes anywhere between five to fifty layers) she incises, scrapes, gouges, and drips the painting into existence. She then colors in with oil sticks by hand or transfers images in between layers of the wax. She finishes it off with several rounds of coating and fusing with a clear encaustic medium for protection and stability.