Page 4 - Wax & Words

Introduction: Your Wax & Words
Lyn Belisle is an
artist, author, graphic
designer and educator
who lives and works
in San Antonio, Texas.
Lyn works in painting,
mixed media collage and
earthenware sculpture.
This allows her to
combine technology,
photography, clay, and
studio art. Her blog,
SHARDS, chronicles
many of her explorations
in various media.
In January of 2013,
she founded Lyn Belisle
Studio, A Place of
Creative Belonging,
where she works as
Artist-In-Residence and
hosts cultural gatherings
and workshops. She has
written articles for Cloth
Paper Scissors magazine
on mixed media projects
and is currently working
on a book about collage
and composition.
Wax & Words 4
Workshop
Human nature loves a mystery, a clue, a broken shard that hints at a story. My own artwork is rooted
in the idea of “Shards,” small bits of meaning that, when collected in a composition, invite the viewer to
elicit a response based on personal experience.
The Wax & Words concept came about when a poet friend asked me to create an introductory encaustic
workshop for her writing group. I had just read an article about Emily Dickinson that described hundreds
of poems in various states of composition that her sister Lavinia found after Emily’s death. Lavinia also
found, intriguingly, the “scraps,” a cache of lines that Dickinson wrote on scavenged paper: the flap of a
manila envelope, the backs of letters, chocolate wrappers, bits of newspaper. Shards and clues!
This is not a poetry workshop nor an extensive encaustic workshop, but an expressive combination
of content and process. You’ll learn about asemic writing, a wordless open semantic form of writing,
as a component of evocative collage. The word asemic means “having no specific semantic content,” or
“without the smallest unit of meaning.” With the non-specificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum
of meaning, which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret.
In this Wax & Words Workshop eBook, you’ll find unique ways to create fascinating visual mysteries
using scraps of words and enigmatic marks, compellingly arranged and captured behind layers of
translucent beeswax. You’ll learn what collage materials work well with beeswax and encaustic medium.
We will explore mark-making with all kinds of tools, including sticks, stamps, and sprayed walnut
ink over stencils. We will also use a bit of veiled imagery as a “grace mark” to emphasize the mystery
and meaning of our collage work. Areas of the artwork will be isolated, then covered with thin layers of
beeswax to add translucency to the mystery of the marks. The resulting work is elegant, personal, and
timeless.
For more in-depth concentration on encaustic, mark-making and calligraphy, I learned so much from the
late Nancy Crawford. Her death in 2018 left a huge hole in the creative community, and I am so grateful
that her work endures on her website and in private collections