Karen Francis is a finder and a keeper of odd lost things.  Whether it’s the unused wooden hands of saints, skulls and bones, old keys, or milagros—they all find new homes and new life in her artwork.  
    “A lot of times I just collect materials and keep them,” she says, sipping coffee in her sunlit window nook, “I love old rusty things like rotted out cans.  I love clock pieces, and I love seed pods—different things that don’t look like much alone, but if you can do something with them it just brings more texture and interest to a piece.”
    Francis intuitively assembles unrelated objects and gets them to work together in her pieces.  “I am pulling things together that sort of resonate with me. I work with something and sometimes it sits for maybe six months before I pick it up again and do something with it.  Almost as if it has to just hold off and wait until something just snaps in my mind that says ‘this would be great’ something that adds to it and gives it that finished look that I was thinking of but I hadn’t quite found yet.”
    These assemblages of materials are then coated with encaustic—a mixture of beeswax, Damar resin, and oil paint heated to 200 degrees and spread on with brushes or palette knives.  For Francis, encaustic offers endless possibilities: “You can make it very dull or you can make it very shiny.  You can buff it.  If it’s flat, you can take your hand and burnish it, and it brings out more sheen and catches light much nicer.  And it’s just wax, so you can melt it off and start over again.”
    Though Francis’ encaustic works currently lean more towards the impressionistic and representational, she has an inclining to experiment with more abstract work in the future.  “It would be interesting because I’ve never done that sort of work,” she says, “I would be stretching, but that might be good.”      But for now for Francis her focus is on bringing disparate elements together into a unified assemblage.  After all, it is just wax.  If she doesn’t like it, she can scrape it all off and start the whole experimental and creative process again.  To Francis, making art is simply “nice to have something that takes up your entire thought process and let’s you think of nothing else but what you are creating.”