In the quiet darkness just before morning, LSA senior Ariela Steif leans over her work table. Passersby — if there were any — would be presented with a peculiar scene: Framed in the window of her first floor apartment, Steif is surrounded by brushes of every size and shape, scalpels, a heat gun and a heating tray filled with cans of molten colored wax.

The window is open. The sound of buzzing and the smell of paint fumes fill the air. Her medium, known as encaustic painting, is as ancient as the Greeks, though it is now an obscure art form. This type of painting, using a combination of beeswax, resin and pigment, is labor intensive — the colored wax must be heated to the right temperature, mixed a very specific way and applied quickly before it cools. The art commands her attention.

The process is long and complex: Multi-colored layers of wax are added to the canvas, and each addition must be reheated and fused to its hardened predecessors. Most encaustic artists go through many periods of adding wax, fusing it, chipping it away and adding more wax until they achieve the desired effect. So why would an artist, in this age of instantaneous results, take the time to revive such an archaic art form? Why deal with such a tedious medium? Steif says that, for her, the dividends are worth the painstaking effort.

“It’s an incredibly difficult medium to master. It took me months and months and months to learn — learning how to control the wax, choosing the right tools and implements, a thousand different things," she said.

"From the angle you hold the heat gun to mixing different colors, there’s just so many things to learn. But there are so many effects you can achieve. You can bury things in encaustic, like paper. You can build up multiple layers. And this depth is important to the concepts I have been exploring.”

It is a combination of encaustic painting’s qualities of translucency and depth that draws Steif to the medium. Steif has been working in encaustic since her sophomore year. Originally an oil painter and watercolorist, she chose to switch to encaustic because the medium better fit her expressive nature. Over the past two years, this interest has grown into a dedication to encaustic painting and has recently resulted in a solo installation in the Michigan Union.

“It comes down to the way I paint or the themes that I’m interested in. I’ve always been interested in looking at marginalia and things that are not one thing or another. They’re sort of in between," Steif said.

"And encaustic fits that really well because it’s sometimes a solid and it’s sometimes a liquid. It’s sometimes opaque and sometimes transparent. It exists in this strange region in between all of these things. It works well with what I want to say.”

According to Steif’s artist statement (a description of the medium and her artistic intentions), she is interested in representing “fragments of dreams and memories” and exploring “the interstices of things, sites of liminality.” It should be no surprise that she chooses to paint in the early morning — a time when dreams and memories are still connected and the day has not quite begun. And she draws from multiple sources for inspiration.

“In medieval folklore the spaces in the margins, those which are betwixt and between — the edge of the sea, between night and day, doorways and thresholds — were thought to be dangerous places of power and transformation,” Steif wrote in her artist statement. “These marginal spaces are reflected in the region that my paintings occupy: the no-man’s land between representation and non-representation.”

Encaustic, rooted in the Greek word encaustikos — meaning “to burn in” — was first mentioned by Pliny the Elder in his manuscript “Naturalis Historia.” According to Pliny, the Greeks invented this painting technique circa the 5th and 4th centuries B.C.E.