Ruth Maude
About Ruth
Ruth Maude is a Canadian artist, instructor, blogger, and web designer based in Toronto, Ontario. She is the founder of All Things Encaustic, a blog offering techniques and resources for the encaustic art community.
Ruth’s artistic process is driven by experimentation—encaustic offers endless possibilities. Her paintings often begin with loose mark-making and playful underpainting, creating space for discovery. Through layering and revision, intuition and experience shape the final work.
Her work is included in the permanent collection of The Museum of Encaustic Art (MoEA) in New Mexico and is held in private collections in Canada and the United States.
She is a board member and Chair of Marketing and Communications at Propeller Art Gallery, and an organizer, presenter, and instructor at the Canadian Encaustic Conference. Through these roles, she helps create opportunities for dialogue, learning, and exchange within the art community.
You can view Ruth’s work at:
www.ruthmaude.com
www.allthingsencaustic.com
www.ruthmaude.com/links
Class Details
Underpainting: Pigmenting Encaustic Gesso
This lesson focuses on creating an underpainting using pigmented encaustic gesso as a foundation for subsequent wax layers. Ruth Maude demonstrates how she pigments R&F encaustic gesso with Kama Aqua-Dispersion Pigments and sets up a stay-wet palette to keep the paint workable.
She shows a range of mark-making techniques used to build visual interest on the substrate, then walks through how encaustic medium and encaustic paints are layered over the dry gesso, transforming the surface from matte and chalky to rich and luminous. The lesson also looks at how areas of the underpainting can be selectively exposed or obscured through layers of wax, creating depth and interplay between visible and hidden layers. Ruth also discusses the benefits of working this way.
Komorebi: Sacred Light Through Trees
Komorebi describes the phenomenon of sunlight filtering through trees. In this lesson, Ruth Maude shares her step-by-step process for creating her Komorebi series of small works, where silhouetted branches and blocks of colour come together to create a stained-glass effect.
Ruth walks through how she photographs winter tree branches, prepares the image, and prints it for use in encaustic. She demonstrates how the panel is prepared with encaustic and how the image is integrated into the work. She then shows how colour is added to the negative spaces between branches, allowing the tree form to guide the composition. The lesson also covers finishing and framing these small works.
