Wax • Paper • Scissors

Wax • Paper • Scissors brings together contemporary mixed media artists— Jennifer Billingsly, Karen Eide, L. Michelle Geiger, Meg Norling, and Jeannine Barton Regan— all working in encaustic. In both two- and three-dimensional work, the artists explore the boundless range of encaustic’s luminosity, transparency, and texture, as well as its affinity for collage, photography, found materials, and more. Five distinct voices, united by beeswax — five different explorations of this versatile medium.

Encaustic painting is an ancient process that dates back to the 5th century BC. Beeswax is mixed with a sap resin and used either pigmented or clear. It is heated on a griddle and applied with brushes to wood panels, paper, or other surfaces and results in luminous, richly layered work with a unique character that stands apart from other mediums. It can be used strictly as paint or combined with contemporary processes such as surface embellishment, 3-D forms, image transfer, incising, collaging, and mark-making. As a medium, it offers a myriad of possibilities and is an ideal complement to, or stand-alone process for, oil painters, printmakers, collagists, sculptors, watercolorists, and other artists.

Jennifer Billingsly, Last Spring, Encaustic and mixed media (detail)

Meet the Artists

Meg Norling

As a mixed media artist, I often combine encaustic medium, paint, photography, printed materials, and found objects. Assemblage work especially resonates with the explorer and scavenger in me; I love finding and piecing together disparate elements and ideas. My art often expresses a mixed sense of awe, appreciation and concern for the world around us.

I have a combined 30 years’ experience as an Art Director, Writer, Health Researcher and Educator. After retiring from UVA in 2020, I was proud to complete the Piedmont Master Gardener Training Program in 2022. Since then, I’ve volunteered with a variety of community programs to promote environmental sustainability, share horticultural best practices, and inspire a love of nature and gardening.

As a long-time hiker and naturalist, the pieces in this show celebrate the beauty of the Virginia landscape, especially the native plants which are so important to sustaining biodiversity in our local ecosystems.

L. Michelle Geiger

L. Michelle Geiger is an artist who works in mixed media both sculptural and wall pieces. She uses multiple layers, with found and recycled materials. She has been working in bookarts and printmaking for more than thirty years and studied both fine art and marine biology. She expresses her love of the ocean and concerns for the environment by creating mixed media pieces using discarded materials. She works with paper, wood, steel, wax, and sometimes plastic to create. 

Jennifer Billingsly

Jennifer Billingsly is a mixed media artist. Her works incorporate alternative photographic processes, printmaking, book binding and sculpture that explore the interplay between light and shadow and story.

Karen Eide

I draw from a personal iconography of flora and fauna, collected from places I’ve lived and dreams, that are woven into ambiguous and abstracted settings. My connection with the subconscious, the unconscious, the invisible, and mysterious unseen powers at work in our lives fuels this recurrent thread. I explore nature’s frangibleness and wonder in a quiet, contemplative manner - a place of respite in this precarious world.  Interweaving realism and abstraction gives birth to a personal language for my imagery to live.

With encaustic paint, markers, graphite, inks, and hand-cut collage papers, I can work with the precision of clean-cut lines as well as the looseness of mark-making. Combining these mediums and processes evokes a meditative, often ethereal feel, while rich textures and layers provide a history that transcends time and space.

Jeannine Barton Regan

My paintings explore the ambiguous line between the abstract and the literal, striving to capture the essence of, and the evocative feeling of a place or experience The work is a process of building up and tearing down, adding and then excavating, scraping and melting — pushing the image to the edge of loss, and then bringing it back again. Images are often filled with a moody, earthy, textural energy that has become the signature of my work.