Wax and Light in Woodstock: Regina B. Quinn’s Art of Atmosphere and Defiance

  By Robert Brune

      At 68, Regina B. Quinn paints with the energy of someone who cannot wait for morning.“I can’t wait to get up and turn the hot plates on,” she said, describing her process with a thrill that feels contagious. Even when a piece does not resolve the way she hopes, the act of painting itself remains electrifying. Quinn is currently featured in the group exhibition Media Annual: Waxworks at the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum, which runs through March 8, which is fittingly concluding on International Women’s Day. She will also participate in WAAM’s upcoming FOCUS: A Feast for the Eyes, opening March 14 and on view through April 26. This past Saturday, she led a public encaustic workshop at WAAM, introducing participants to the luminous and deeply textural medium she has spent decades mastering.
      Encaustic painting, which involves layering pigmented wax fused with heat, is both ancient and immediate. In Quinn’s hands, it becomes atmospheric and immersive. Her work often evokes landscapes without depicting them directly. Viewers sense marshes at dawn, forests glazed with ice, or expanses of sky glowing with restrained intensity.
She builds these effects patiently. When asked about the mixing of styles of painting, as to her unique gift of fusing intensity and restraint in her works, “As you build up the layers, the colors intensify. And when you paint translucently, then you’re getting kind of optical blending as opposed to mixing two colors, they glow individually because one is laid over the other.” The process demands restraint. She uses very little pigment relative to wax medium, allowing light to permeate even darker passages. The result is what one might call a dance between intensity and control. Her ‘After the Ice Storm’ painting, currently at WAAM, was created after a brutal ice storm left her without power for a week and grew from the sound of ice coated branches tinkling like glass in the woods. Scratches and slashes hint at frozen limbs. The glow beneath suggests lingering light. The sense of place emerges not through literal description but through memory and atmosphere.
        When asked about the way the eye moves through her “Marsh at Dawn” painting, which in the background is a very traditional one dimensional sky and in the foreground is a completely different technique that offers a multidimensional layer, Quinn offered a revealing insight, “Yes,” she explained, “you kind of paint in the reverse direction. Really building that distant atmosphere, and then I can kind of get closer to the viewer and build that texture.” By starting with what feels farthest away and gradually advancing toward the foreground, she recreates the way human vision naturally focuses.
Quinn’s artistic journey unfolded alongside a distinguished career in education. Originally from New York City, she studied art at St. John’s University before continuing her studies in Vermont, where she spent much of her adult life. She worked as a public-school teacher and eventually served as a principal from kindergarten through high school. Throughout those years, she maintained a parallel art practice.

Other encaustics from the WAAM exhibition