Unique Muskoka August

Above: Peter Fromme-Douglas stands with a piece from his new series entitled Movement. Below: Fromme-Douglas uses a propane torch to heat an
encaustic piece from a the same series.
some pieces of work have or will become
encaustic paintings, also known as hot wax
painting. Colour is added to heated beeswax
and then applied to some type of canvas
surface. Fromme-Douglas has been building
his own wood canvas frames
from scratch and pouring his
own wax into blocks in a
workshop next door to his
gallery.
“It’s a weird medium to work
with but I love the quality of it.
It has a softness, translucent,
kind of eerie quality that I really
like,” he says. He loves the
feeling of movement and has
been experimenting with
different ways of putting
movement into his photography
or paintings.
28 UNIQUE MUSKOKA August 2016
When Fromme-Douglas expresses why he
does what he does, he refers to a saying his
friend George, a retired pastor, once told him.
“I wrote it down on the back of this card
because I didn’t want to forget it,” he says,
reaching for a white index card propped up
on a table next to him. He reads, “‘You can’t
have a true biography without love.’ When he
said this to me I took out the word biography
and put anything in there,” he says.
“You can’t do what you do
without love and if you do, it’s
biased. When I paint, when I
create, it’s all about love. It is a
commitment to looking for the
best of the best in whatever I am
doing, whether it’s a subject, a
boat, a woman, an old man, a
flower,” he explains.
And he can’t imagine
spending his time on anything
except art. “If I make it to 90
years old I will still be doing this
every single day, 20 hours a day
if I can.”