About Joanna 

Joanna Oliver works in a wide variety of media, and enjoys experimenting with different approaches to art-making. Since graduating from Queen’s University in Kingston with a BFA in 2000, she has been particularly drawn to the beauty and sensuality of oils and encaustics and as a result, wax often tends to find its way into her projects.  She often incorporates found objects into her artwork, and finds particular meaning in using or re-using materials that her grandparents have utilized in their projects during their lifetimes.   

About the Studio

Joanna’s studio is located inside her Grandfather’s old metal workshop in Palgrave; a building located just behind the house in which her grandparents still reside. The space has been completely updated, with track lighting, heating and new drywall, and is a large open room where she can be free to work on many projects at once. The front part of the studio building remains much as her grandfather left it when he retired from metalworking, and is still very much useable as a woodshop. Joanna uses the tools at her disposal to build new surfaces and stretchers for her artwork.

About Encaustics

Encaustic is a type of hot, pigmented wax that artists use in painting. The wax is most often micro-crystaline (petroleum-based and man-made), to make it more flexible and able to go on canvas. Micro-crystaline wax is also either colourless or a light yellow, making it easy to accept colour. Some artists use beeswax (it is the medium that is historically associated with encaustic), but beeswax is more brittle when dry and is unsuited to being used on canvas. It also tends to have a deeper natural colour, making it more difficult to colour with pigment. Joanna uses micro-crystaline wax in all of her encaustic artwork.

Historically, encaustics have been in use since the time of the Greeks and Romans, and were also used by artists in paintings during the Middle Ages. See this Wikipedia article for more information on the history of encaustics.

Joanna has developed her own method of working with encaustic, and normally uses clear, un-pigmented wax in-between layers of oil paint. These layers alternate and build up to create a bumpy texture, which can then be smoothed out with heat, or augmented with further application of wax. It’s the versatility of encaustic that has kept Joanna coming back to use it.