Southern California based artist, Suzanne Merritt, has been honing her skills in encaustic painting since the late 1990s. Merritt's process includes melting pure pigments into wax and resin, fusing it onto wood panels with a torch, and often embedding found objects into her paintings. After years of working in oil, Merritt shifted to encaustic when she learned about it through a colleague she'd worked with in Maui. Her evolution into this medium allowed her to capture the texture and movement of her subject matter, which has often included abstract ocean and landscape pieces. Her current work is a return to collage, where she intuitively layers various symbolic images, book pages, letters, and photographs beneath the wax, sometimes scraping and etching messages into the painting, each telling a story.
Merritt studied Creative Writing and Literature at UCSD and received her Master of Fine Arts at Bennington College in Vermont. While she still enjoys writing, she returned to painting full-time shortly after she completed her studies.
When she's not painting, Merritt loves to travel and is currently planning a work/travel sojourn to Europe to teach Encaustics.
