Say Hello To My Little Artist Friend

I have been fortunate enough to become friends with one of the area's talented and innovative artists, Alex Levine. Levine works in encaustic media, which is a process through which artwork is made using wax, resin and colored pigments. The best-known encaustic works are ancient Greek funeral portraits.

"This medium marries the richness and vibrancy of oil paints with the fluid life of watercolors while adding its own unique versatility," Alex says on his Etsy site.

Alex came to work in encaustics out of curiosity. It was a medium he first dabbled in, then studied, and went on to make his own fusing the process with pictures taken from vintage beauty advertisements. Alex creates a colored and highly textured base onto which he transfers selected images, then seals the work over embracing the imperfections left in the work.

"Each of my images in this collection explores elements of female beauty, often where the hyper-feminine and the androgynous intersect," Alex says. "My pieces employ a combination of encaustics, vintage photo transfers and oil pastels. Eschewing gauzy transparency for bold interplays of saturated color, they utilize the imperfections in the photo transfer to highlight the unique texture and dimension of the encaustic media."

Alex was kind enough to lend his artistic hand to create a logo for The Afternoon Nap Society — a sleeping woman created in a simple ink drawing. I colorized the drawing to reflect my own self.

Alex's artwork can be found at www.etsy.com/shop/encausticsbyalex.