Willa Vennema is a contemporary Maine artist whose luminous encaustic paintings capture the layered beauty of coastal Maine art. Working with beeswax, damar crystals, pigment, and found materials, she creates compositions that shimmer with depth and texture, balancing abstraction with the quiet presence of landscape and sea. Her paintings are meditations on memory, time, and place, each surface revealing traces of both experiment and restraint.Willa often works in series to explore ideas over long periods. Her "Boat Series," developed over more than a decade, transforms the archetypal dory into a metaphor for resilience, stillness, and passage. Other ongoing bodies of work—the "House Series," and "Island and Ocean Series"—draw from the magnificent beauty of Maine’s coast and her lifelong connection to Swan’s Island. “The wax has its own will,” she explains. “I want to communicate a place without fully defining it.”Her artistic foundation began at Oberlin College, where she studied art history and studio art, and deepened at The Cooper Union, where she earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts. This blend of scholarship and practice underpins her curiosity and experimentation. A longtime member of New England Wax, Willa exhibits frequently in museums and university galleries across New England. Her work is held in more than 150 private and public collections, including Maine Medical Center, Avesta Housing, and Southern Maine Community College.Dividing her time between Portland and Swan’s Island, Willa continues to push the possibilities of encaustic painting, layering, embedding, and carving until each painting achieves its own balance of structure and spontaneity. Listen to Willa's conservation on Radio Maine.