Burning to create

When I met Elise Wagner, she was working her nine-to-five job as the language requirements specialist and office coordinator on the fourth floor of Neuberger Hall. She excused herself to a co-worker, and we found a quiet place to talk.

“I’m in my day job, and nobody knows who I am,” Wagner said.

When she’s not working at Portland State, Wagner creates celebrated contemporary abstract art from her North Portland studio using a technique known as encaustic.

Encaustic is “an ancient medium using molten beeswax combined with dry pigments and natural resin,” according to Wagner’s website.

The medium is over two thousand years old. Its history stretches from Egyptian funerary portraits before the time of Christ to Jasper Johns in the 20th century.

Wagner was initially introduced to it while studying at Portland State in the early ’90s.

“I’ve been doing encaustic painting for 20 years, and I started doing it when I was exposed to a demonstration of it here at PSU,” she said. “I taught myself how to do it.”

The labor-intensive process involves fusing the molten beeswax to the canvas with a heat source: “encaustic” literally means “to burn in.” Originally an open flame under a piece of metal heated the canvas, though a heated iron or a propane torch is more commonly used now to adhere the wax.

Wagner’s techniques produce visually striking, texturally compelling works of contemporary art—works with heft that contain a deeper, more elemental meaning for Wagner.

“My work is related to physics and science,” she said. “There was this real fascination with geology and open landscapes that led to an interest in physics and all the things you can’t see like particles and how matter is generated.”

Wagner’s interest in the juxtaposition of science and art was fostered by her studies as an undergraduate at PSU: “I purposely got a B.S., so I studied a lot of physics when I was here,” she said.

Wagner’s fusion of science and art was celebrated last month with the Quantum and Creative Connections Exhibit at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, Mass.

“It was a solo show where the physics faculty and art history faculty presented distinguished faculty lectures about my work,” Wagner said. “It was what I had always been working towards, as far as getting a dialogue happening between the two disciplines, and a real interdisciplinary dialogue took place.”

The interdisciplinary exhibit also featured interviews, large-scale projections of Wagner’s art and a talk by the artist herself.

“It was the culmination of my life’s work, really,” Wagner said.

The entire experience was “phenomenal,” according to Wagner, though occasionally surreal.

“They flew me in and they put me up in Cambridge right next to Harvard, and I’m walking through Harvard Yard to get my Starbucks coffee, and running on the Charles, and there was the talk and I’m still like, ‘What just happened here?’” Wagner said.

“I have to work at not having that post-show depression,” she added with a laugh.

The post-show hangover is unlikely to set in any time soon, however, because Wagner’s work is slowly garnering more attention in the Portland area. Several of her paintings will be featured in the upcoming season of the IFC cult-hit, Portlandia.

“They put a call out to submissions, and someone brought it to my attention,” Wagner said. “I was very tongue-in-cheek with my submission, and I think that’s why they called me up. They said, ‘We want as much as you can give us.’”

The program’s art department couldn’t give her too many specifics about how her paintings will be used, though one Portlandia employee did issue a gentle warning: “He said, ‘Now, you know we’re probably going to make fun of your work,’ and I said ‘That’s great!’”

Much of the art that will be used in Portlandia is currently on display at the Butters Gallery on Northwest Fifth Avenue and Davis Street, Wagner’s gallery here in town. Several new pieces of Wagner’s art will be on display for at the Butters for November’s First Thursday Gallery Walk, which is free and open to the public.

The second season of Portlandia begins in January, and Wagner will be watching intently. She will be as surprised as anyone when she sees how her artwork is used.

“I’m going to watch every episode because I have no idea,” she said.

And, appropriate for a woman whose artwork will be featured in the off-beat, hipster-ish Portlandia, Wagner will have to find somewhere to watch the show.

“I don’t even have a television,” she said.