Encaustic Artist Neranza Noel Blount Biography Reviews Resume

I was first introduced to Neranza during a weeklong encaustic workshop I was teaching at Arrowmont Center for the Arts in Tennessee. In that short period of time I saw her intently examine the practice of painting in hot wax and pigment, explore the possibilities of her creative ideas and develop new approaches to her painting. Her enthusiasm and serious interest was infectious. From painstaking studies of master copy to free spirited invention, Neranza's practice of controlling the paint medium while visually giving shape to her ideas is paramount. Coming from a background that includes beekeeping, painting with melted wax seems like a natural calling. The careful observation of nature, her love of the body in motion and a responsive sense of color all contribute to her latest groups of paintings. Whether she is expressing the world through representation or abstraction Neranza’s painting comes from the heart, filtered through the senses and visualized for all to experience.

Painter Jasper Johns once suggested that it is commonplace for artists to incorporate or manipulate an object in their work, but when they then repeatedly "do something else to it" the result might be a unique work of art. Local artist Neranza Noel Blount takes those additional steps in her encaustic (ie. wax) paintings. Blount takes photographs of the natural world, applies them to board, and then heaps layer upon layer of pigmented encaustic medium over the photographs. Typically the underlying image is completely concealed by the multiple strata of wax. In an interview Blount said she takes particular pleasure in buffing smooth surfaces to bring out the soft shine one can achieve with encaustic. She sometimes adds random scatterings of plant material that render a surface rough in places -- these surfaces tend to be less seductive. Blount also applies multiple layers of thin tissue paper with the wax pigment, and she allows the paper to bubble and crease. After that, by carefully breaking the bubbles to create erratic ridges and indentations, and emphasizing creases with added pigment to create what appear to be natural forms such as waves and tendrils, Blount ends up with surfaces that are complex and painterly, apparently conjured into being. Her best works in this show are the nearly monochromatic waterscapes like "Frozen Creek" that may be the most heavily re-worked yet visually the most stark.

Environmental concerns also inform Blount's practice. She wrote: "Little honeybees produce the wax as well as honey which is the only food that will not spoil. Honeybees are so important to our quality of life being our number one pollinator, that so many people do not realize. Besides having fun painting with the wax, I want to help educate the public about honeybees and maybe even encourage new beekeepers."

“I first met Neranza a few years ago while working alongside her at the Knoxville Museum of Art. Neranza is a gifted painter whose unique exploration of the timeless medium of encaustic painting is taken to new levels in her interpretations of the natural world. In Neranza's paintings focused on landscapes and details from Frozen Head as well as her Dakota Winter series she has skillfully taken a medium used more than 3000 years ago by the Greeks in Ancient Egypt for portraiture to a powerful tool of expression, and abstraction in a contemporary practice that pushes the medium to it's limits, and delivers! Neranza is also a skilled draftsman with a superb sense of color and composition, and I would without hesitation recommend her for private commissions, or commercial endeavors.” March 4, 2010