For someone teaching an elementary school art class, bringing in wax, melting it and using it to paint probably isn’t the best idea. But for one Chicago artist, a type of art that didn’t work as a lesson plan became a new career path, one that has allowed her to explore her feelings about the city she calls home.
Alicia Forestall-Boehm, 43, calls herself an urban encaustic artist. She uses melted wax as paint to create raised two-dimensional images that reflect Chicago’s architecture. Most often, she uses a flat base, usually a piece of wood, and lays many layers of colored wax on top of it. She then digs into the wax with sharp tools, creating a variety of textures that range from a glossy smoothness to the unevenness of a mountain range. She sits in her studio, a room in the River North condo she shares with her husband, and gazes out the window at buildings old and new.“I think, with the exception of Hong Kong, we have the most amazing skyline, because of its variety of shapes and architectural styles,” she said. “We’re the home of the modern metal and glass skyscraper, but yet, you see these amazing old buildings.”
Forestall-Boehm has considered Chicago home since she and her family moved from a town outside Detroit to Oak Park when she was 16. After earning an economics degree at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, she moved into the city. She earned a masters degree in business administration at DePaul University, and took a job in advertising and marketing. “I went the comfortable route, the safe route,” she said. “I always wanted to do something creative, but it was always ‘No, no, you’ve got your business degree.’ ”After 12 years, she cut back her schedule, working part-time as a consultant, hoping to free up her schedule to pursue her creative passions.
A friend, knowing she enjoyed art, invited Forestall-Boehm to teach elementary students art history at the local Montessori school. She discovered encaustics while searching through an art history book for projects for her students – it was very common in ancient Egypt. But she didn’t want to bring the students in contact with the extreme heat necessary to melt and dry beeswax – a key component of the art form. She decided on a myriad of other projects, including teaching the students to create their own versions of prehistoric cave paintings. Yet, the idea of painting with wax intrigued her on a personal level as something she might be able to pursue. She bought some materials from a New York supplier and noticed the company would soon hold classes in Chicago. Attending one of those classes in 2006 is what cemented her love for the work. “What got me hooked was really taking the class and getting some structure and getting some answers to questions,” she said. “’Why are there bubbles appearing when I don’t want bubbles to appear?’”
Ken Gold, another Chicago encaustic artist, remembers meeting Forestall-Boehm at the workshop. During four intense days, the eight participants worked together intimately. “She was fairly new then. But I remember she was quite talented.” He said that the Chicago-based encaustic art community continues to be tight-knit. “We certainly all support each other,” he said. After completing the workshop, Forestall-Boehm had to look no further than out her Ohio Street condo window for subject matter. “I look at a million kinds of buildings, and that gets me thinking,” she said. “Even when I was back in advertising, I was thinking very much about symmetry and asymmetry. That was something that appealed to me. I loved the horizontal and the vertical. That’s when I began my window series.”
Encaustic artists use colored beeswax to create a variety of types of art. Two-dimensional works on wood or canvas, called encaustic paintings, are most common. Others make sculpture. Some incorporate three-dimensional objects, such as dried fish, into mostly-flat pieces. But all encaustic pieces involve melting wax mixed with colored pigment, heating it, laying it on some medium, allowing it to dry, and repeating the process with multiple layers. The emphasis is often on creating smooth, glossy, finished surfaces. In fact, that’s part of what drew Forestall-Boehm to the craft. But once she dug into the field, Forestall-Boehm’s new passion was for exploring how to add texture to these glossy wax surfaces. After laying the wax down, she literally re-melts the wax and then digs into it to add texture, using tools often reserved for pottery artists creating designs in still-moldable clay. Removing parts of certain layers of wax from her paintings allows viewers to peek through the dimensions of the painting to see what lies beneath, as if looking in an actual window. It’s similar to many two-dimensional paintings laid on top of each other, with openings revealing inner layers of color and texture in different portions of the piece.
After she’d been working on the window series for about six months, Forestall-Boehm started exhibiting her work at local art galleries. Many visitors asked her about her work, thinking the windows were made of small tiles. In fact, they weren’t, but Forestall-Boehm said that gave her an idea. Mere months later, she launched her mosaic series, called Tesserae, which repurposes encaustic art’s traditional layers of wax as small tiles that create a mosaic piece. “It’s sort of a logical combination of ancient mosaics and ancient encaustics,” said Forestall-Boehm. “So while it’s not tied into the architecture of Chicago, it has come from the windows themselves.”
Forestall-Boehm’s work is currently available at the Illinois Artisan Shop, located in the Loop at the Thompson Center, and her father’s OAK Gallery in Ravenswood. Robert Forestall said art was a part of the household throughout his daughter’s youth, but he never wanted to push either of his children into it. “I never said to do this or do that,” he said. “In the long run, it’s important that your children are happy.”
One of Forestall-Boehm’s fellow encaustic artists, Emily Rutledge, also works with urban themes, but she focuses on graffiti art. She first met Forestall-Boehm at a meeting of Chicago encaustic artists called Fused Chicago: “I remember reading her art statement, and thinking it sounded like what I do,” said Rutledge. “But then when I saw her work, I realized there was a whole different aspect to it. But it was still about the city. We both create compositions influenced by the urban landscape, but our work could not be more different.”
Forestall-Boehm’s current project reflects the ongoing destruction of buildings in the city. During the last year, she watched the demolition of a CVS building from her window.The process fascinated her, she said. It was like watching a television show. “I’d yell to my husband, ‘The wrecking ball is going to break through the wall!’But her mood quickly changed from amusement to concern. The lot is now vacant, the planned new condo building delayed by financial constraints.“It needed to be torn down,” she said, “but they shouldn’t have been so irresponsible to tear it down when they couldn’t put something new there. ”So she’s creating neutral-colored wax-enclosed blocks wrapped in twine to represent the emptiness and barrenness she sees in that empty lot .Throughout her series, the art that informs the city’s buildings remains her steadfast inspiration. “Architects are artists. In Chicago, it’s this perfect blend of different styles and it just really works.”