Crossing a Line: The Encaustic Studio

Join mixed-media artist Daniella Woolf as she speaks about her life and the evolution of her artwork.

Daniella’s journey starts in 1918 with a photo of her Russian immigrant grandparents outside their storefront in the Lower East Side of New York City. Her family migrated to LA where everyone found employment in the film industry. In her own words, she “swung like Tarzan from one medium to the next: from ceramics to jewellery, textiles, fiber, collage, furniture design, and finally encaustic.”

In 1971, she was in the right place at the right time to start graduate school, studying Textile Structures at UCLA. It was the time of the pivotal exhibition Deliberate Entanglements that brought together fibre artists from all over the world. Her career was set and for the next forty years she would create challenging and innovative works that explore the creative potential of different media.

Daniella Woolf holds an MA in Design with a specialty in Textile Structures from UCLA. Over her career she has worked in a variety of media, including fibre, collage, jewellery, installation, and most recently encaustic. She is a principal of Wax Works West, a school for the encaustic arts, in Califonia. She teaches in the western states for R&F Handmade Paints and globally for Wax Works West. She is a 2007 recipient of the Gail Rich Award for excellence in the arts in Santa Cruz and the 2008 Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship.

Her current work is exhibited nationally and internationally. She has a very popular teaching DVD, Encaustic with a Textile Sensibility, and a book which is a “gallery between pages” under the same title. Her newest publication, The Encaustic Studio: A Wax Workshop in Mixed-Media Art, will be published in May 2012 by Interweave Press. She blogs at Encausticopolis under the name Dotty Stripes.