( an eye into encaustics )

by sydney hetrick

lisa gauker, a freshly funky artist who calls blandon her home, spends time laboring away in her own studio but also teaches in the 19547 zip code. a lot of her magic happens at clay on main, which is nuzzled into the main street of the oley valley.  at the nonprofit known for its tenacious and heartfelt support of all sorts of art-inspired fun for the insides, she teaches, paints, makes jewelry and ceramics, and dabbles her weekly minutes passionately in many an artistic endeavor, making her mark in the berks county art-swept landscape. as a young girl, she found herself “inadvertently drawn to art,” she says, as her face turns up with a glowing smile.
    
inspiration arises for gauker through a sort of biological thought process. she recalls a time in her life whilst veterinary medicine nearly wooed her heart and intrigued her intellect. when gauker’s art teacher joked that she’d never be happy with a cow-birthing lifestyle, she decided to attend the pennsylvania college of art and design in lancaster, instead. there, she earned a bachelor of fine art degree, honing her skills all the more at the academic level.
    
gauker’s art tends to gravitate toward small subject matters. sometimes, an insect will crawl into her mind and make its way into her artwork as the subject. once in a while, she’ll throw a real (and really dead !) bug itself into the composition. her old roots of veterinary-intrigue are reflected in her art, since it’s often related to animal behavior and biological processes. she titles herself a “process-oriented person,” explaining that her journey is more important than the destination mindset. to gauker, her process is often more crucial and integral than the subject, in the end.

( copper pods, encaustic, mixed media on masonite

photo courtesy of lisa gauker )

( cut short, encaustic, charcoal, mixed media on paper
photo courtesy of lisa gauker )

    
by now, she’s been at clay on main for three years. her time there began soon after she bumped into the nonprofit’s owner, dolores kirschner, following graduation from art school.  back in senior high, she’d helped out periodically at clay on main, but once she came back to the region, post-academia, she knew she felt ready to instruct. tuesdays, she says, she coaches on the basics of hand-building with clay. but, gauker jokes that she’s more of a “sounding board” for ideas with her students because many of them, she vocalizes, are rather skilled and don’t actually need much assistance in their art-ways.
    
and when it comes to her own work, it pours to life in phases, she explains. this year, she’s into printmaking, while last year, 50 to 75 percent of her works were encaustics. gauker stumbled upon the persuasion of encaustics in her college days—essentially, they are brought about through layerings of wax used to draw attention to an image. gauker loved the ethereal-organic appearance of this art style.
     

compelled with a sudden theory, she wanted to find a visual approach for presenting the imagery of industry. “i tried to humanize the idea of an abandoned building and the life it once had,” she reveals.

( skin no. 6, encaustic and ink on paper

photo courtesy of lisa gauker )

( skin no. 1, encaustic and ink on paper

photo courtesy of lisa gauker )

    

“the imagery is drawn onto paper, either from observation or a photo,” gauker says, with the coal belt in schuylkill county as a large part of her inspiration. “the wax builds from the drawing up. the encaustics i do are normally working off of paper because i like the translucency the wax gives the paper when it soaks in.”

    

the drawings themselves are ink, graphite, and sometimes charcoal.

    

not only was lisa thrilled with the way wax allowed for “romanticizing the industrial landscape” but, she also beams, “it smells great, too !”  for her encaustics, she uses unfiltered, unbleached wax—more specifically, beeswax and dammar crystals. when she’s lucky, she says, she goes to a man at the leesport farmers’ market and buys a wax supply. he isn’t just a guy with beeswax, though; he’s a beekeeper, and therefore, this wax has actual bee-body parts in the very meat of it, bringing back into the picture an unexpected connection to gauker’s old penchant for biological angles of life wrapped into art.  she is even pursuing beekeeping herself now, though at a novice level.

    

gauker heats up the wax in a skillet, applying it often with different sizes of brushes. “from there, the wax can be inscribed, melted with a heat gun, scraped back, painted on, and fused, then with more layers applied,” she says. “color is added between layers with oil paints and pigmented encaustic medium.”

    

encaustics, gauker explains, take their history from the egyptians and romans, as they practiced the art form in their days long ago. but encaustics have had a resurgence, she notes. “people are tired of traditional painting.” this bee-spent medium certainly re-livens creativity’s makings, a good pinch.  her works are more than just flat-set paint on a tired canvas. they seem to have a life of their own, as the wax drips appear almost stopped in time.