Arts and Entertainment

Encaustic painter Karen Brown fuels passion with her love for natureh

February 27, 2025   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

When your job is your passion, your art and your living, you must be doing many things right. As encaustic artist and horticulturalist, Karen Brown reflects on her life, she can truly say she considers herself lucky.

Born and raised on a Dufferin County farm, Brown learned how to tend the land and developed an affinity for nature in all its wonders.

“I was a superintendent for a golf course for 30 years,” she told the Citizen. “Then, by extension, I left the golf course in 2018 to work on a private estate in Dufferin. As a horticulturist, all my work in art is nature-inspired by my work in the fields.

An ardent fan of the Alton Mill Arts Centre, she has had The Hive Encaustic Studio for many years there, painting and teaching others how to do encaustic painting.

Brown says she would love to spend all her time at the Alton Mill. She can do well with her art and, as she maps out her life, that is what she looks forward to doing full time.

“That’s what I want to do in my 60s,” she said, “Right now I teach two to three times a month on the weekends because I work during the week. But I would love to teach during [all of] the month. As it is people ask me, ‘when do you find time to do art?’”

Encaustic painting goes back thousands of years. Take a trip to the ROM in Toronto and upstairs in the Roman exhibits are paintings of beautiful women, dressed as they were in the times of the Roman Empire. The paintings are unspoiled, the colours vibrant and those paintings are thousands of years old.

This is encaustic painting, using beeswax and pigment. 

Brown went on to tell us why this style of painting suits her so well, saying “I am a type-A personality. The process using beeswax-based [paint] is very forgiving. I work in my studio at home too.”

Her process: she has to make time to paint, as she claims she is “not intuitive” but works to a schedule when she has the time. Because it is beeswax, as she told us, there is no rush.

The paint of beeswax and pigment is molten, hot and fluid. It is the only paint that goes from solid to liquid to solid again. So, she can keep coming back to her painting as time suits.

“That’s the nice thing about working with beeswax,” she observed. 

To keep the beeswax and paint molten, Brown uses a pancake griddle. Little pots with paint and pigment – all molten – keep it fluid and at top heat. It gets quite hot at 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Once a painting is started, it can be left to cool and harden to then be painted on some more at any moment or it can be left for a week.

Brown uses boards as the canvas for her work. It has to be a solid surface as the heated wax would bend a canvas and the painting would crack.

“That’s good,” was her comment, “I can use any kind of wood.- old kitchen cabinets. It’s a karma product, to reuse everything.”

Nature blooms in all of her paintings, with flowers in most of her work. Brown did a solo show last year at the Alton Mill, based on Japanese art, called Kintsugi, where broken bowls are repaired artistically, using gold to restore the pots and accentuate the broken lines in gold. 

“Because I can paint on ceramics,” she said having recently discovered this art form, “I loved the whole philosophy of repairing broken things by making them beautiful again.”

This is a series, Brown explained, with gold Kintsugi, she can use the bowls with her works of barns, floral, her wildlife series, owls – that kind of collection.

Karen Brown’s paintings are muted with layers and lots of colours through all the layers of wax. Hers are not bold but dreamy works with an ethereal feel to it.

“I do that because I paint with wax,” she said simply.

She did art training all through school. In high school, Brown did photography, learning how to use a dark room, “It was so great.” Then she worked with oil paints and still “dabbles in watercolour.”

She found that her own lifestyle and the time division her work allowed did not work for oil painting and she gave it up.

It was then she discovered encaustic. Because it is so forgiving, she has been able to introduce a multi-media aspect, using her photography, as well as Japanese paper, pastels and charcoal too, all work and the reason is it lasts.

She likes white wax, which is filtered through charcoal. Yellow wax can be used to make colour. She affirms Canadian waxes are best and she likes to buy small batches at a time from local farmers.

Karen Brown does have her own bees but does not take much wax from them nor do she and her husband, Joel, take much honey.

“I like having lots of bees.” she said. “So, I don’t use their honey. There are lots of local farms with bees where we can get honey.”

Wax can be hard to find, the good stuff, as she put it. If it is local farmers who have bees and might use their own bags. They come to her with small amounts; sometimes, she finds good wax at a farmers market, “anywhere,” she said.

At this pleasant stage of her life, “I’ve done very well in my career and my life is a wonderful life I enjoy very much. I grew up on a farm, loved the golf course.

“I am where I want to be,” she was happy to report, adding, “I don’t like getting bored but there’s the challenge which working on the land gives, that 200 acres. We are actually turning it wild, working with old pastures, getting rid of invasive species is quite a process.

“I’d like to get that done before I’m done with it.”

Karen and Joel have very recently bought a pottery studio, fully equipped, where there can be bowls made for breaking and putting back together, beautifully.

She said, “My husband always wanted to try pottery. We’re just started – we’re learning.”

You can learn more about Karen Brown at www.karenbrownencaustics.com

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