When she opened the door of the studio her senses were immediately enchanted by the sweet smell of beeswax.
When she stepped inside and looked closer she could see heating elements on which were perched tin cans of various sizes with their rims thickly lined with coloured wax. Some with wooden clothespins attached for handles. She saw sky blue and sea blue and pea green and forest green and red and orange and sunny yellow. She saw white, black and grey, too.
Also on the work tables, beside the liquid, beautifully coloured waxes she saw squat, business-like blow torches to be fired up and used to bond the layers of beeswax that will be forming the work of the 4 artists gathered.
She laid out her materials at her place and began to work. Before her, already glued to small wooden platforms, were 3 haiku poems and images she was planning to frame with the fragrant coloured beeswax laid out like a banquet before her.
She dug in and grasped the handle of a paint brush already poised in the can containing the royal purple wax. She stroked it on quickly and with abandon all around the edge of her first image. She added thick layer after thin layer periodically stopping to fuse them together with the hissing blue flame provided.
Once she had created a thick, multicoloured layer of beeswax around her image she began embedding strands of copper wire as well as the small, round, beadlike heads of push pins. Pins she had trimmed down to a very short length so they would penetrate the wax but not push into the board that is at the base of her work.
Once she had all the elements she had envisioned framing this image she began to work the beeswax. She engraved it. She polished it. She used lots of pressure when needed and less when it was not. She built up and she excavate down into the wax until the entire piece spoke to her.
For her second piece she repeated the process but this time she embedded small words at various depths so the message of her haiku poem and image was amplified. Her message of diving below the surface to reach the truth was beautifully illustrated by the layers of words spinning, rising and falling around the dreamy face gazing out from the centre of the piece. Thought provoking words like knife, repulsive, love, moon, vision, delirious, rain, soar, sweat, moment, and bare.
She framed her third and final piece with natural coloured beeswax embedded with dried seeds, twigs and bark gathered on a walk with her best friend. It will make a good gift to honour all the wonderful walks they took together this winter on snowy paths midst friendly trees.
(On her way home she recalls the bee tattooed on her right instep and smiles.)
The End
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