Wax Artist Makes It Look Natural

Aglow has been given the right name. It’s an abstract of shapes and colors, but the vibrant yellow in the background suffuses it with sun, with life, as if the viewer is looking upward through something — the slide of a single cell, or a lattice of bridges — into a summer sky. The way the colors keep separate, yet flow together, makes the effect possible, and that is the result of the technique the artist uses. That technique, it turns out, is the focus of the show.

The piece is part of ​“Wax,” a show of wax encaustic works by artist Roberta Friedman, up now through Oct. 1 at City Gallery at 994 State St. ​“This show is about making art with wax media — hot wax, cold wax, waxed oil pigments. The art of encaustic (hot wax painting) is ancient and exquisite,” Freidman writes in an accompanying statement. ​“Its rules are complex and demanding, requiring a host of special tools and materials. Layering, fusing with heat, mark making, gouging out, filling in, the emergence of design and color. Using stencils to create images and surfaces and then obliterating them to fashion something new and unexpected.”

“I am drawn to the nuances that this medium allows and creates,” she continues. ​“It is messy but forgiving, technical but liberating. Painting with intense, vibrant hot wax blocks of color and with juicy oil pigment sticks allows my affinity for vivid color to run rampant. The continued effort is in containing and controlling that exuberance.”

That Friedman arrives at the finished pieces by a kind of agreement with the medium can be seen in the works themselves. In some, the marks of the tools Friedman uses are visible, as she uses them to create shapes and patterns in the layers of color. 

In other cases, like Fantastic Forest, the dialogue between the artist and the medium is so detailed that it’s hard to appreciate just how layers are happening unless you come close. Then you see it; as the title suggests, the painting is built from layers after gauzy layers of color and texture, and close viewing offers rewards the same way a close examination of a handful of soil might, to find the tiny animals living there, the seeds beginning to sprout, the fungi making their subterranean networks.

Friedman shows how working with wax is somewhere between painting and sculpture. She also shows how wax encaustic, perhaps more successfully than many other media, can capture the energy in natural places, from waves to soil. The celebration of the medium itself, and the process of give and take that comes from working with it, is a model for a way of engaging with the broader world around us. We don’t have to try to bend the world around us to our will, nor do we have to succumb to it. We can guide it, and let it guide us, in something more like collaboration, or conversation. At its best, the results can be luminous.

“Wax” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through Oct. 1. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.