Elizabeth Hubler-Torrey creates paintings and sculpture that reflect her inspiration from the natural world. Her luminous creations have an internal glow from her use of beeswax and the technique of encaustic. She is self-taught in the medium of encaustic and is attracted to its versatility. It can range from hard to pliable when slightly warm for forming shapes. She uses technique pairings like atmospheric layering and glazing to utilize its transparent quality inherent to the wax and at the same time can build up areas of relief and impasto, with highly textured areas. She employs overlapping colored wax to build up textures, ironing with heat, pouring, scraping, and staining the wax with oil paint, and adds pastels, ink and watercolor. She discovers new encaustic techniques with each piece.
A native of Lansing, Michigan Elizabeth now lives and works in the Grand Rapids area. In 2014 she received an MFA in Painting from Kendall College of Art and Design (KCAD). She works primarily in encaustic, that is the art of using heated wax with paint to create a multitude of effects from thin veils of transparent color to textures that can be expanded into surface relief techniques. Wax is a versatile medium that can be used with a variety of multi-media like ink, oil bar, pastel, photography, printmaking paper, and watercolor.
She was awarded the Artist-in-Residence, Acadia National Park Schoodic Institute, Winter Harbor, Maine, 2017, Golden Apple Residency in Maine, 2015 and 3rd place grant in the Art in Science competition from the Arts and Industry Council of Battle and Guest Visiting Artist for Continuing Studies Program at KCAD in 2015. She has been included in various competitions and exhibitions including Place in Proximity at (SCENE) MetroSpace gallery at Michigan State University, East Lansing, Fusion in the Visual Arts, Kreft Center for the Arts at Concordia University in Ann Arbor, Art Michigan All-Media Competition at Lansing Art Gallery and In Our Midst: Greater Lansing Artists, Kresge Art Museum at MSU.
You can see Elizabeth’s encaustic fine art at her website https://elizabethhublertorrey.com/
