PRESS
THE ALCHEMY OF PRINT: ISSUE 33
Whilst artist Elise Wagner can usually be found teaching workshops from her studio in Astoria, Oregon, she heads to Guanajuato, Mexico (the birthplace of Diego Rivera) every January to lead a printmaking retreat, and recently found herself teaching some classes at Brixton’s Artichoke Print Studio. She also happens to be the creator of Wagner’s Collagraph Wax – an encaustic paint specially formulated for collagraph printmaking. Considering herself an oil and encaustic painter first, it’s her time spent as a ‘closet printmaker’ that gave birth to this intriguing product. “My printmaking practice and exposure to the vast world of printmaking developed in cadence with the development of my wax collagraph method and my product,” says Elise. Collagraph Wax came about as the result of an ‘ah-ha!’ moment while she was experimenting in her studio. “After being gifted a kitchen rolling pin, I tried to use it to print over the textures of my encaustic paintings on thin wood panels,” she explains. “This proved difficult and it was clear that I needed to find a better, more flexible solution.”
Thank you for the kind writeup by Warnock fine Arts, our newest gallery:
Elise Wagner: Ancient materials, contemporary abstraction.
Elise Wagner and the Material Language of Encaustic Collagraph
“For more than three decades, Elise Wagner has explored the luminous possibilities of encaustic painting — building layered surfaces from beeswax, damar resin, and pigment. Less widely discussed, but equally significant, is her contribution to contemporary printmaking. Through the development of encaustic collagraph, Wagner extends her painting practice into works on paper that retain the same sensitivity to surface, translucency, and structure.
In her hands, wax becomes not only a painting medium, but a printable matrix.”
Elise’s prints are represented by Warnock Fine Arts in Palm Springs, CA.
Pushing the Boundaries: The Story of How One Artist Went Beyond Encaustic and Inadvertently Innovated a Process and a Product
As an artist, I’ve always been interested in pushing the boundaries of my chosen medium and exploring their physical properties to innovate new ways of working. I am primarily a painter, but I began studying printmaking in college. Over time, I have integrated elements of printmaking into my working vocabulary. To this day, I bounce between encaustic, oil, printmaking, and various mixed media approaches. When I saw a demonstration of encaustic in college, I taught myself the technique, following an urge to suspend collage materials in my mixed media oil paintings to gain transparency and depth. This was all before the encaustic renaissance; before the internet, books, associations, blogs or conferences on the medium.
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