(upbeat music) - I like working as an artist because ideas come to me and I wanna have that come to life.

Sometimes it's frustrating, but there just is that joy when it really does all come together.

I'm Vicki Radel.

I am from the western prairie of Minnesota between Wheaton and Norcross, and I am a mixed media artist, working primarily with encaustic hot wax and cold wax and oil.

That's about right.

I always loved art.

When I first started taking classes, they were all kind of an acrylic.

I got frustrated 'cause I couldn't get what I wanted, and then I took the encaustic class and I totally fell in love with it.

I like how this is coming through here with that yellow.

I actually got what was in my head to the wood.

It just felt like magic.

(gentle music) And encaustic, it's beeswax with resin, which makes the boiling point go up so it doesn't melt easy like beeswax does.

And then you just add different pigments to it.

And then my palate is a pancake griddle with tuna cans, and then you put the regular bees wax in and then this pigmented bees wax in these cans, and then it's all melted liquid.

And when you apply it to the board, it gets solid really quickly.

So then you have to apply heat to get it to adhere to the board and to melt again into a nice layer, and so it's either a heat gun, or I actually prefer a torch.

It's kind of fun to be able to paint with fire.

(upbeat music) I go back and forth now between the encaustic and the cold wax.

With cold wax, it's still beeswax, but instead of the resin added to it, it's added a solvent to it so that it gets almost like paste.

And then you mix that with regular oil paints.

I have to work on wood because the canvas can bend and that would break the wax, so I work primarily on wood.

I can use a pallet knife, I can use a brayer, I can use a bowl scraper, a spatula and create a lot of nice textures and those different aspects in my paintings.

You can layer these layers of paint and so you get this incredible depth in the surface.

(upbeat music) A lot of my inspiration comes from living on the prairie.

It's that peace and quiet and I love that just wide open feel.

The prairie and the sky, like in the cold, everything that I feel.

Often in my paintings, there's expanses of space.

I've found that I can't paint the same painting twice.

The wax has its own way of doing things.

Sometimes that's frustrating, but mostly I like it because they're usually surprises and they kind of take me in another direction, so it's kind of like really getting in tune with the medium and following that a bit as well as my own ideas.

The raw wood series was kind of an interesting little accident.

My husband worked at the lumberyard, and one day he came home with a board that had this kind of eaten out part of it so they couldn't use the lumber.

And this is when I became a mixed media painter, because what I realized is if I used encaustic on the whole piece of wood, you wouldn't see the wood grain.

And so I'd find another way to have more transparent colors so that the wood grain would show through, and so that's when I started using some wood dyes and ink and other things.

I'd like people that look at my art to feel something, and that they resonate in some ways with the artwork that's done.

I think that's one of the reasons why the raw wood works so much better, 'cause people can tell what it is and there's a basicness to it, and then it has a twist.

And I think that they resonate with that because it feels familiar.

I have benefited so much from living in Minnesota because of the generosity of the arts community.

One of the things about being an artist in a rural community, and we are in one of the least populated counties in Minnesota, is that there's not a lot of other artists.

It's hard to find the resources as you continue to move in your career.

I've joined different art galleries where you can get that kind of commiseration back and forth.

I've had some shows in the small town here.

I've had shows through our Lake Region Art Council.

They helped me set up my encaustic studio.

I'm glad I get to do it.

It feeds a part of me that doesn't get fed anywhere else.

- [Narrator] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, and by the members of Prairie Public.