ABOUT
Janise Yntema is a contemporary painter noted for her use of ancient and sustainable techniques, particularly beeswax encaustic. Working within the landscape genre, Yntema addresses environmental issues — deforestation, plant extinction, and the irreversible effects of human impact on the earth. Through layering, repetition, and the physical presence of her materials, she creates works that invite contemplation on impermanence, transformation, and connection.
Intrigued by the fine line between figuration and abstraction, Yntema blurs the boundary between the objective and the subjective, as the romantic landscape tradition reveals its darker truths. For Yntema, landscape remains inherently political: beeswax becomes a material metaphor for the fragility of the natural world and the urgency of environmental conservation.
This sustained engagement with beeswax and landscape has drawn Yntema's practice increasingly toward environmental discourse. She has researched and presented two lectures at the International Encaustic Conference in Provincetown, MA: "The Politics Behind the Bees" (2017) and "The Environmental Politics of Wax and the Future of Encaustic" (2019). In 2020, she presented her master's dissertation, Ecoactivism: Framing the Geopolitics of Contemporary Landscape and Its Representation. In 2018, Yntema received the International Encaustic Artists' Vendéenne Award in recognition of her outstanding contribution to the advancement of encaustic art.
Originally from New York, Yntema received her formal art training at Parsons School of Design/The New School, NYC, where she is recognized as a New School Notable in the visual arts, alongside artists such as Adolph Gottlieb, Jasper Johns, and Ai Weiwei. She holds a master's degree in the History and Philosophy of Art from the Paris School of Cultural History, University of Kent, with a dissertation titled Ecoactivism: Framing the Geopolitics of Contemporary Landscape and Its Representation.
Yntema has exhibited in New York, London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Berlin, and her works are held in numerous public and private collections.
QUOTES
"Yntema combines fine art with philosophy. In her response to landscape, the elusive experience of viewing light, always transitory, is the synaptic path to transcendence."– Christina Jansen, Managing Director, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
"Her work reveals such an elegant way to hint at our planet's fate." – Anne Sutherland Harris, Art Historian
"Janise Yntema celebrates the beauty of landscape and atmosphere. Never in landscape format, her square or upright rectangles are thus perhaps images of aspiration beyond the merely earthbound." – Professor Duncan MacMillan, HRSA, FRSE, The Scotsman
"Yntema's process involves mixed media, with one process obscuring another and the subject revealing itself at an enigmatic point." – Jan Patience, The Sunday Post
"Her paintings capture and emanate light toward a transcendent feeling of tranquillity, order, and purity. Yntema's colours create silence and simplicity; an atmosphere of transcendent lightness remains." – Jacquelyn Stonberg, Ph.D., Professor of Art History, Kean University, NJ
"In a minimalist manner, Yntema captures the recollection of light where hue is the reminder that opens an unseeable distance. She creates a physical container for the uncontainable." – Joanne Mattera, NYC, Author, Curator, Artist
"Yntema captures what Rothko might have realized if, in fact, he'd had a more feminine understanding of the world." – Andy Butler, Musician, Hercules and Love Affair
"With her affinity for the land and attraction towards the spiritual, Yntema's paintings embrace the primal and unseen found both in the world that surrounds and within. Sharing within the romantic tradition, her works rest firmly within the realm of the sublime." – Mark Ferguson, Writer
"With a philosophical, aesthetic vision, Janise Yntema shares the emotional response of the Romantic poets to the surreal, sublime beauty of the natural world. Her superlative exhibition of majestic, moody paintings document with delicate detail ‘the earth’s fragile beauty,’ reflecting time, space and place – all at once, realistic, lyrical and imagined." – Vivien Tevlin, Arts and Travel Writer, The Smart Leisure Guide
HISTORY OF ENCAUSTIC
Encaustic painting — a technique combining beeswax, dammar resin, and pigment — dates back over two millennia. The ancient Greeks applied this medium to warships, statuary, and architectural surfaces, valuing its resilience against saltwater and weathering. Its archival durability is most vividly demonstrated by the Fayum funerary portraits of Roman Egypt, whose luminosity and chromatic integrity remain remarkably intact after nearly two thousand years. The same materials were employed in the murals of Pompeii. The technique persisted until roughly the 4th – 7th centuries CE, when it was gradually supplanted by tempera and fresco — mediums that demanded less time, labor, and technical mastery of heat. By the medieval period, encaustic had largely disappeared from artistic practice.
The term encaustic derives from the Greek enkaustikos, "to burn in." True beeswax-and-resin painting requires heat to fuse successive layers, with heat functioning as an invisible solvent — analogous to turpentine's role as an evaporating solvent in oil painting. Dammar resin, harvested from trees native to Southeast Asia, lends the wax structural strength and long-term durability. Both materials are organically pure: the beeswax a product of the honeybee's labor, the resin a natural secretion requiring no chemical processing. This material purity yields a surface of singular quality — luminous, almost dermal in its translucency, capable of holding color with a depth and subtlety unmatched by synthetic media.
– Janise Yntema, 2026