I am an Encaustic and Cold Wax + Oil painter. These mediums lend themselves to the development of translucent, layered, textured and striking paintings, alive with color. Although I took all my "non-required" courses in college in the fine arts department (I was a printmaker) I majored in Consumer Economics and my professional background and experience is in the literal and concrete. I was a lawyer for 5 years and then a law professor at the University of Maine for over twenty-five years and am now leading a Law + Innovation Lab at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. As a law teacher, I use my empathy, knowledge and technology skills to address income inequality and to remove barriers to access to civil justice. As an artist, I use my art-related knowledge and skills to attempt to understand what I feel about the world around me. To paraphrase Stella Adler, life can beat you down and crush your soul, but art reminds you that you have one. I began working (playing?) with wax as a child. I made my sister a 3D card out of wax when I was 13, and evolved into a batik artist. The minute that I began experimenting with encaustic and cold wax painting, I was hooked. I love that encaustic painting requires a strong physical interaction with materials. Moving wax on a solid surface is a dynamic and corporeal process. I scrape and mold, and sometimes just let the wax move on its own. The transformation of liquid to molten to solid creates movement, texture, depth and relief. Cold wax requires me to think about the impact each color willI have on the previous layer, and how to achieve maximum depth and complexity. Sometimes I struggle to get a message to emerge ? and other times it materializes on its own. My work is abstract and relies on images, form, color, tone, scale and dimension. As observed by Aristotle, "The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance."