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