Ruth Maude is a Canadian artist, blogger, instructor and web designer.

Her work is in the permanent collection of The Museum of Encaustic Art, (MoEA) NM, and in private collections in Canada and the United States.

She paints with molten pigmented beeswax, an ancient medium called encaustic. Heat is used at every stage of the process to apply and fuse the medium.

The founder of the popular All Things Encaustic blog, she is constantly experimenting with a variety of encaustic materials, techniques and tools and sharing her discoveries with her readers.

She works from her home studio in Toronto.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

To me, art-making is a creative practice of exploration and play. I’m committed to carving out space in my life to show up and learn what it has to teach me about myself and my world.

Encaustic is a wonderfully versatile medium. I love the natural beauty of beeswax and the wide range of techniques that work with it. I’m drawn to the way encaustic painting engages my senses—the way that it looks, smells and feels. Encaustic painting is done in layers. It is a process of building up and scraping away to reveal what lies beneath the surface. Each layer of encaustic medium is fused using heat. Working with different fusing tools I can either maintain or eliminate texture.

Often there’s an interesting call-and-response dynamic between what the wax chooses to do and my intention as I paint.

- Ruth Maude