“I paint with fire,” says encaustic artist Melissa Stutts. “It’s the easiest way to tell people what I do. And they probably think that means, like, I’m Evel Knievel. But it’s very disciplined. It’s nuanced, like sipping tea next to a crackling fire versus just painting more stuff on top of stuff.”
We’re at McColl Center, in the studio she’s occupied since December. The walls are lined with Stutts’ paintings, which she creates with layers of heated wax that she manipulates and mixes with colored pigments. The floating shelves display smaller canvases and reproductions of her large-scale paintings; many feature simple shapes and nontraditional materials like ground metals, rusty nails, and botanicals.
In the corner of the room is the type of beat-up griddle you’d find at a garage sale; on top is a saucepan with a thermometer poking out. It gives off a faint smell of beeswax, but nothing that knocks me over. The windowless space has a large ceiling vent and a box fan on the floor to keep the fumes under control. “I love my shitty little griddle,” Stutts says as she checks the thermometer. “I’m never getting rid of you, buddy. We’ve been through so much together. But when this heats up to over 220, he’ll smoke, and then that releases a poisonous gas.”
Encaustic artist Melissa Stutts prepares one of her paintings at McColl Center.
I’m here to talk about her art, but this meeting is a reunion, too. Stutts, 39, is a friend and former colleague who was Charlotte Parent’s art director for eight years and associate art director at Charlotte magazine until spring 2020, when the pandemic forced us to reduce our staff. At the time, her husband, Ethan, a guitarist and bassist, lost all of his gigs, and a tree had crashed through the roof of the home they’d recently bought. “To work so hard to build up a creative professional space and have it pulled out from under you immediately,” she says, “it’s really scary.”
But the absence of a day job allowed Stutts, who’d studied art and design at Appalachian State University and grown accustomed to working late nights in her home studio, to pursue painting full time. She’d always worked with mixed media. Then a meeting with friend and artist Sarah Helser changed everything. “All I knew was that you could use (encaustic) to preserve body parts or, like, the hull of a ship,” she says. “And then I smelled it in her studio, and it was just intoxicating. And I started YouTubing. I got books, and I realized you can move it around with fire.”
Encaustic painting dates back to ancient Greece and was first used by boat makers to waterproof ship hulls. Artists loved the medium for its ability to keep pigment vibrant and give paintings a glassy sheen. The technique began making a comeback in the 1990s, and today artists use it on a range of surfaces like wood panels, paper, and pottery.
Water Child
Encaustic, 20” x 20”
Perfectly Imperfect Series
Encaustic, oil, 24k gold leaf, 5” x 5”
Tough As Nails
Encaustic, nails, 8” x 8”
With their home repaired, Stutts continued to experiment with her new medium of choice. “Neighbors walking with their kids or dogs would stop downwind,” she says, “and I’m sure they thought I was making meth.”
But that’s where the magic happened. She layered the wax and played with different shapes, colors, and textures and explored themes that kept her up at night. “I’ve always loved a circle because it has no harsh edges,” she says. “But at the same time, a circle is made up of a bajillion little straight lines. When I think about this world we live in, it’s literally made of ones and zeros, like in programming and tech. So it’s this reinterpretation of complicated things that I simplified as a way for me and my anxious brain to not feel so overwhelmed.”
Stutts did pop-ups around town and began to sell her work through the art collective at Slate Interiors. In 2021, Shain Gallery selected her for its Up-and-Coming Artist Invitational, and the following year, she was one of four artists featured in its first encaustic showcase. “I dropped my paintings off, and a few days later, I drove by to make sure they still looked OK,” she says. “I saw another picture in their place, and my three were gone. I thought, Oh my God, the wires broke. So I called the gallery, and she’s like, ‘Oh, no, they’re all sold. They’re hanging in someone’s house.’”
The accolades kept coming. Stutts was part of ArtPop’s class of 2022 and saw her work on billboards across the city. “When your name is that big in the sky,” she says, “it’s pretty undeniable, ya know?”
Last fall, a studio at McColl Center opened up, so Stutts took another leap and rented the space. She takes commissions when time allows, but most days, she’s here working on new pieces that she sells through Art House Charlotte. This month, one of her works will appear in the annual ArtFields competition in Lake City, South Carolina. She regularly orders 50-pound bags of wax from a candle supply company and makes her own encaustic. “It takes me about 30 minutes to an hour to get everything heated up,” she says. “A lot of encaustic people either like shellac burns or really intense texture, and mine’s all about very meticulous layers. I like to feel things, and so much of this process for me is feeling the heat.”
Four years after her name left our masthead, Stutts has done what few artists have the courage to do and turned her hobby into her life’s work. I ask her if the art school kid in her ever imagined this is where she’d land. She shakes her head and lets out one of her big, infectious laughs before she stops to consider how far she’s come. “Now that I’m here, I think about how it’s just so wild to bet on yourself,” she says. “I mean, I could also lose everything tomorrow or set this place up in flames. So, you know—balance.”
TAYLOR BOWLER is the lifestyle editor.