Chad Edick of Dublin has long been a worker by day and an artist by night. After putting in his time on the construction jobsite, he holes up in his garage studio and churns out colorful creations long into the night. But it wasn’t until recently that he found what might be his biggest artistic passion to date — encaustic painting.
Edick was working to empty out a home in Francestown, put on the real estate market by the man of the house after his wife passed away. While clearing out some boxes, Edick happened upon a treasure trove of encaustic wax, ready to drip. Turns out the wife had been an artist, too.
“This was her medium,” Edick said. “He was going to throw it away and I said ‘As an artist, I can not let you throw that stuff away.’”
He took the material home, as well as some instructional books, and started working with it, self-teaching and producing his share of “debacles” before getting the hang of it. But even before he began to master the medium, he knew he was drawn to it, perhaps even more than his past drawing and painting pursuits. Just watching the wax melt, he said, was enough.
“It’s what I was looking for at that time,” Edick said. “I was kind of in a funk for a minute, this has been a rejuvenation.”
The process is relatively simple. Edick brings home wood scraps from the job site, uses an iron to melt wax onto the boards and then finesses it with a heat gun.
“I can pretty much push the colors around wherever I want them to when it starts melting,” Edick said.
The result? Astounding. He’s produced abstract pieces, colors swirling in on themselves, morphing from one shade to another. It’s the same concept he’d pursued when watercolor painting, he said, but now, the brilliant colors don’t fade over time.
And, he makes landscapes, not necessarily based on a particular scene, but “a lot of them end up looking like Mount Monadnock because that’s the mountain that we’ve looked at for so long,” he said. “Rolling hills and a mountain in the background, that’s what we know.”
Edick is relatively new to the encaustics game, but he’s getting better and better, and the work he has for sale at Saturday’s Living Local Art Fair (10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Peterborough’s Unitarian Universalist Church) should be an indication of that.
“I’m figuring out new stuff every time,” Edick said.
Editor Ben Conant can be reached at 924-7172, ext. 226.