Educated at UCLA and St. Martin’s in London, Blum has been mastering the difficult medium of encaustic since its re-emergence in the 1980s. Currently living and working in New York City, Blum has exhibited widely nationally and was featured in the seminal publication on encaustic painting, “The Art of Encaustic Painting” (Joanne Mattera, 2001).

Repeatedly alternating many layers of pigmented wax and watercolor, Blum creates a sense of infinity and luminosity in abstractions of sumptous jewel and earth tones. The surfaces of the paintings are smoothly skin-like and the edges are deeply rounded enhancing the implied third dimension of the painting/wax sculpture. Like images from a dream or an opiate haze, Blum’s deep color fields float beneath a creamy skin of beeswax, giving one the impression of a languid gentleness, combined with the indefinable aching of insatiable desire.