Alicia Nathai-Achong Trinidadian encaustic and multi-media artist, Alicia Nathai-Achong, has been honing her artistic skills over her lifetime. As a hobby, art has taken her on many creative adventures spanning paper quilling, watercolour painting, stone painting, acrylic works, multi-media art, cyanotype printing and encaustic painting. Alicia is a wife and mother, a BSc. Mathematics graduate of the University of The West Indies, a Certified Behavioural Coach and the holder of an MBA from Heriot Watt University. For twenty years, she utilized her creativity in the financial sector, to tailor solutions to position her clients to achieve their goals. Her love of creating and her burning desire to develop her artistic talent, as well as to better focus on her holistic self and family life, was the genesis for her shift from banker to full-time artist. Encaustic is her preferred medium and while she has accessed online resources and completed virtual courses on the subject, she is largely self-taught, and continues to experiment with the medium and develop her own techniques and best practices over time. With encaustic being such an obscure medium in her native Trinidad and Tobago, paints are not available off-shelf and thus, Alicia makes most of her own paints at her studio, incorporating beeswax from local apiaries with damar resin, a tree sap. Her work is primarily inspired by the natural beauty of the Caribbean and she enjoys the interplay of various media, such as inks, pigmented shellacs and encaustic paints, to create primarily abstract and semi-abstract works which capture the essence of various aspects of the islands’ landscape, flora and fauna. You are invited to view more of Alicia’s encaustic and mixed media work and follow her art journey through her Instagram account, @alicianathaiachong, and her Facebook Page, ANA Art Gallery. Artist Statement I am captivated by the translucency of encaustic, its glass-like sheen, the multi-dimensional feel of the work as layers of wax are built up to create an image and the hypnotic dingolay (dance) which occurs when encaustic paint is combined with other media, such as shellacs and inks. The multi-sensory experience combining the aroma of beeswax, the sight of flowing, hot encaustic paint and the feel of textured, wax layers as the paint cools, adds to the allure of encaustics for me and I am involved in every step of the creative process, including making my own encaustic paints. Encaustic, as a medium, lends itself to abstract representations of subjects and I would describe my creations as primarily semi-abstract in nature. As I progress along my artistic journey, nature largely influences my creations, though I occasionally also capture other subjects in wax, telling stories through my work.