MOLTEN MASTERPIECES
Dana Patterson Roth combines photography, pigment and wax to create textured works of art
Placitas artist Dana Patterson Roth ventures where photographs meet hot beeswax, pigments, texture and playfulness.
Roth fell in love with photography at the age of 10.
Since that time, she has pivoted through black and white, color, digital and even painting.
Roth’s latest show at Placitas’ Wild Hearts Gallery, which she co-founded, exhibits her new obsession: encaustic photography. The process adds layers of beeswax and pigments to a print, leaving the work with an antique patina. The molten blend creates one-of-akind images. Encaustic is a Greek word meaning “to heat or burn in.” Artists use heat throughout the process, from melting the beeswax and varnish, to fusing the layers of wax.
“The wax feel has really appealed to me,” she said in a telephone interview from Placitas. “It can be smooth and it could have texture.
“Beeswax is fun to work with,” she continued. “You can add color to it; you can add texture to it.”
First, Roth takes the photograph. This time, she returned to an old obsession: trees.
It’s “their connection to the earth,” she said. “And also their intrinsic beauty in winter and their lacey branches. They’re kind of a spirit animal for me.”
She covers the print with clear, heated beeswax using a brush.
The wax can be pigmented with color or remain white or creamy beige. It can give the image a textured surface and density.
Roth sometimes adds powdered or stick pigment onto the waxed surface, then she seals the image with clear wax.
Roth took the image for “The Golden Season” during a hike in the Jemez Mountains. After printing the rows of autumn trees, she painted them with clear beeswax. Next, she used colored wax to add more gold and a touch of pink.
“The texture is coming from the wax itself,” she said. “Each time you do a layer of wax, you use a torch to fuse it to the previous layer.”
She sometimes rubs the results with walnut oil on a paper towel, so the pigment remains within the texture.
“Winter in Northern New Mexico,” featuring a row of trees before a slope of foothills near Heron Lake, is close to its original print, Roth said.
“I love the shape under the trees where the snow melted,” she said.
The artist used clear wax with white pigment, scratching the trees with a scraping tool so that they remained uncovered.
Roth found “Autumn Encore” in Tierra Amarilla.
“That’s an old, abandoned house,” she said. “They’re just beautiful. I think there are still lace curtains. Abandoned buildings have an intrinsic beauty. It’s fall and those trees had this vibrant color.”
A close look reveals a swing set, some abandoned cars and a broken fence.
“Even though the people are gone, there’s still this beauty,” Roth said.
She took the image for “Tree, Glorious Tree!” north of Española. The photograph captures the tree, the brush and the lavender wildflowers beneath it.
Encaustic is an ancient technique dating back to the Greeks, who used wax to caulk ship hulls. Pigmenting the wax gave rise to the decorating of warships. The use of encaustic on panels rivaled the use of tempera in what are the earliest known portable easel paintings. Perhaps the best known of all encaustic work are the Fayum funeral portraits painted in the first through third centuries A.D. by Greek painters in Egypt. A portrait of the deceased painted either in the prime of life or after death was placed over the person’s mummy as a memorial.
Roth says this is only the beginning for her.
“I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface.”
She chose the title “Layers of Memory” because “much as we live our lives — creating new memories, holding onto some and letting others fade away.”