amy vander els

Amy Vander Els is a contemporary artist, jeweler and educator who lives and works in Amesbury, Massachusetts. She has been an arts educator to children and adults since 2004. Amy was introduced to wax-based media in 2015 and has made it her primary focus since then.  

As a student of art and as an art teacher, Amy’s work tended to be realistic not abstract, observational not fantastical, and drawn not painted; figures, landscapes, interior studies in charcoal, sometimes ink, sometimes gouache, mostly a study of light and dark to create a sense of form. When Amy first began to study encaustic painting, she found that she lacked the experience and the control with the heated wax to be able to paint realistically, and she became much more loose, gestural and abstract with her imagery and mark-making.

By connecting this new encaustic painting style to the traditional drawing techniques that had been in her practice for so many years, Amy’s work came full-circle . Using her own observational sketches as a reference when she paints, she pushes and pulls the values of the forms, building layers of lights and the darks to allow the images to take shape, to recede and emerge out of the wax. Through letting go, Amy found her mark, her hand, her voice.

Encaustic painting has allowed Amy to abstract forms in a way that is both measured and unexpected. It is planned and controlled, until it isn’t.  It then becomes a tale of layers, reactions to what came before, choices about what will remain, what will be concealed, what will be revealed.

Amy Vander Els studied Studio Art and Art Education in college, earning both a B.A. and an M.Ed in k-12 Art Education from the University of New Hampshire. Her teaching career brought her overseas to teach art at international schools in Italy, Hungary and the Cayman Islands. Amy returned to New England in 2014, and now designs jewelry, creates artwork and teaches encaustic workshops out of her mill studio on Water Street in Amesbury, Massachusetts. Her award-winning artwork has been featured in solo, invitational, and juried exhibitions and is represented in private collections in the US and abroad. Her jewelry can be found in boutiques, galleries and gift shops throughout New England. Amy is co-chair of the Amesbury Cultural Council, and is a juried member of the New Hampshire Art Association and the Newburyport Art Association.