Welcome New Owner: Irene Gut

***Please note: the online store will reopen in a few days. We will send out a notification here and on our social media channels when it does***

Hey Everyone!

I am so pleased to announce that Irene Gut from Cecil Lake will be taking over the online shop. Irene is an amazing artists, generous teacher, and all around lovely person. She will also be the admin for the Exploring Encaustic Facebook and Instagram pages, continuing with the newsletter, and also the admin for the Friends of Encaustic Art group on Facebook.

Irene is a fun and innovative teacher who moves effortlessly between working with the iron and the hotplate. She updates her skills on a regular basis and I know you will love her as much as I do.

Thank you all so much for making this five year journey with me so much fun as we explored encaustic together. I appreciate your support of myself and the shop and hope we can stay in touch. In addition to my encaustic work, I am going to be exploring more studio time and working with mixed media, assemblage sculpture, and my art dolls. Thank you so much again! Love and hugs to you all - Bethany

All About Irene

 “The artist never entirely knows — We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark” ~Agnes de Mille

I was born and raised in Switzerland and moved to the North West of BC Canada in 1995. At first, I felt a sense of being lost in the vastness of this big beautiful country. I learned to embrace the quiet beauty of the land and now it gives me the inspiration and the time I need to reflect on my daily walks through the hills and valleys of the beautiful Peace River Region.

Growing up I was the happiest child when I got a box of brand new pencil crayons and a coloring book. Did you ever notice how wonderful these new wooden pencils smell? Even nowadays I am taken back to my childhood when I open a new box of these wonderful colours. I can’t help but smell them!

It was about nine years ago, when I came across encaustic for the first time. A card created with wax and the iron was given to me from a cousin in Switzerland. I was hooked! I did some research and ordered my first supplies.

Since then I took several workshops with well known encaustic artists and learned a lot more about the process of painting with wax.

To me working with wax is relaxing, satisfying, fascinating and yes, sometimes frustrating and challenging but I love it.

I fell in love with the versatility and vibrancy of that medium and at the same time there is a luminosity that only wax can have.  And of course you can’t beat the wonderful smell of it!