By Megan Willome
“If oil paint is the prose of painting, then encaustic is its poetry.”
– painter Chester Arnold, “Encaustic Art,” by Lissa Rankin
There’s something about Donna Roche’s paintings that make you want to reach out and feel the burn.
“You can touch it,” she said, pointing to her art displayed at Fredericksburg Art Guild.
Roche makes art using encaustic, an ancient technique combining wax and pigment, which are then fused with heat. Encaustic comes from a Greek word meaning “to burn in.” Some of Roche’s paintings may have smooth, glass-like sections of color and others may have rough sections that stick out from the surface. Some may have both in the same piece of art. The differences in texture are created by heat and flame.
And heat and flame are things Roche knows well. She was a firefighter for twenty years in Boulder, Colorado. When she was hired, all firefighters were also medics, so she has her basic EMT certification.
“I had always done hard physical labor. I thought, ‘How hard can it be?’ Roche said.
She’d grown up on a farm in Iowa and had never even seen a mountain until she went west on a Trailways bus. She came in 14th out of 13 available spots, but later the fire department asked her to apply again and she was hired. That was in 1981.
“It was a giant leap of faith. It was a time when few women were in the fire service. We were not exactly welcomed with open arms. I was tested and challenged on a daily basis for the first couple of years.
It was all about proving myself to be capable and tough,” Roche said. “That experience gave me the courage to face a challenge, like believing I could be an artist.”
Growing up, Roche was not a strong student — except in her high school art class, under a teacher named Lucille Rogers. After Roche retired she and her photographer husband moved to Fredericksburg, and she decided the time was right to pursue art.
They have seven acres and a variety of animals, including horses. It took her husband a while to adjust to the dark and the quiet, but Roche loves it. Her studio on the property is the perfect place to create.
“It’s very meditative. I can be in space with quiet and some music, my dog, and hours fly by. I can shut everything else out,” she said.
Roche is new to encaustic — she’s mostly self-taught from YouTube videos and books. She’s considered teaching the technique, but it requires a lot of ventilation for the fumes. The process of encaustic is intensive, requiring tools like electric griddles, heat guns, heat lamps, hot plates, tacking irons and gas torches.
“That appealed to me,” she said. “Of course, for me, the heat, the fire — I have an affinity for that.”
Roche melts beeswax and damar resin and combines that with pigment. Each color is applied to an absorbent surface, then each new layer must be fused with heat.
“You hit that pigment with the heat and it moves. There’s not a lot of control. It’s extremely frustrating, but if it’s wrong you scrape it off and start again. Like most things, you just learn and become more comfortable as you do it,” she said.
Encaustic dates to the first century in Rome, but it experienced renewed interest in the late-20th century. It can be layered or scraped, can utilize oil paint or pastel, and can even be used to create special effects, like inlay or stencil.
Roche enjoys encaustic’s flexibility. She can make art that is abstract or representational or something in between.
The encaustic process lends itself to collage, and Roche has used gauze, tea bags and metal in her artwork (she’s done a bit of welding), and she’s considered working with photographs as well. She’s also added a shellac burn to the edges of some of her paintings, a process she describes as “setting it on fire.”
Because encaustic art is made with wax, it can be destroyed in extreme heat. “Don’t leave it in your car in the summertime,” she warned.
Roche joined the Fredericksburg Art Guild in 2019 and has found it to be a supportive group that emphasizes educating the public.
“It’s the perfect place for me to start,” she said. “I’m just gonna continue to make my art, to create. I’m pretty compelled to do it. It’s insatiable.”