Through his use of texture and color, local encaustic artist Marc Kundmann finds beauty in life’s imperfections.

Marc Kundmann did not initially intend to fall in love with the Cape. In 1995, his partner, now husband, “dragged” him along to a family event in Truro. Kundmann was quickly immersed in the Cape’s natural beauty, which overwhelmed him with unexpected familiarity and nostalgia. Growing up in Chicago, Illinois, his childhood scenery was marked by family trips to the sandy dunes, pine forests and grand bodies of water that characterize the shores of eastern Lake Michigan. Almost immediately, the Cape felt like home. 

Kundmann was a graphic designer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at the time of his trip. However, a few years later, he and his husband decided to abandon the rigidity of corporate life and take a chance on Cape Cod living. 

After hauling his life to the Cape, Kundmann temporarily continued working remotely as a graphic designer while developing fundamental painting skills. He never had a formal background in painting, yet he had been fond of drawing and painting since he was a child. This inner passion flourished on the Cape, where Kundmann felt no place could match the artistic opportunities and inspiration that surrounded him in Truro and Provincetown.  

Kundmann first dipped his toes into painting by studying alongside other masterful Cape artists. He studied with Jim Peters and other painters connected with the expressionist style. During Peters’ class, Kundmann first learned how to paint figures of models with a composition that matched his emotional response. He no longer fixated on creating an accurate, life-like depiction of a scene with the proper color scheme. Instead, Peters helped Kundmann focus on a creative approach to emotion, texture and color. “When I think of painting, it’s less about actual representation but more about using color and the lines to make sense of the world of the painting. Maybe there’s a lot of yellow, and for some reason, that feels right. The sky might be yellow, and that has nothing to do with reality, but it gives the painting an emotional quality,” Kundmann says.

Texture functions as a critical vehicle that Kundmann uses to capture the emotions of the Cape. At the beginning of Kundmann’s professional artistic career, he worked with oil paints. Yet, by themselves, oil paints took a long time to dry. Consequently, Kundmann began to overwork his paintings, and the once vibrant colors would begin to mush together. Kundmann soon began adding cold wax to his oil paints to increase their thickness and develop a deeper texture. Each of Kundmann’s brush strokes gained intention since they were more direct from the use of cold wax. 

Through artist Cynthia Packard’s demonstration, Kundmann was introduced to another medium: encaustic. Encaustic combines wax with pigment. Packard mixed wax with paint, threw it on a canvas, and set it on fire, creating fascinating effects. Following Packard’s presentation, Kundmann was inspired to dive deeply into what encaustic was and how he could begin to work with it. From his research, he learned that encaustic combines beeswax and pine resin that can be heated to a liquid form and mixed with colorful pigments. 

His journey with encaustic did not stop with a simple internet search, and soon, Kundmann set out to try the art form for himself. Now, encaustics is one of the main mediums used to produce his works. Kundmann labors over a pancake griddle to create his encaustic paintings. “I have a griddle with all of my little containers of color, and I stick my brush into that, and start painting. But of course, because it’s wax, it dries very fast, and that’s a bit of the process,” Kundmann shares. He cannot blend over his strokes while painting because of encaustic’s speedy drying process. While some would consider this a shortcoming, Kundmann finds beauty in the overlapping, unmixed colors. “What I love about encaustic is that it is a complete antidote to the idea of over-fussing with paint,” he comments. “You literally had to stick your brush in—and I get about 30 seconds to brush the wax on. It doesn’t combine too much with the other layers directly, but it builds layers and you can use a torch to melt the wax a little bit, and that helps blend colors and create some texture.” His inability to slowly meld the colors together gives his work a unique richness and intense volume. 

Implementing wax through encaustic or cold wax in oil paints establishes an atmosphere-building texture, which can be found in many of his paintings. His beach scenes of the Cape’s enormous dunes or figures sunbathing on the sand are emotionally amplified through detailed texture, which gives humanity to his work. Kundmann’s use of wax illustrates a sense of randomness, which, he notes, can only be found in nature. “If you look at a tree trunk with lichen on it, you could sit there and paint all that. But with just some scratches into the wax, because it is so thick, you can almost be sculptural with it,” he explains. 

Kundmann’s work captures the world’s disorderly, random and imperfect qualities. Similarly, he hopes to capture the aging process of the natural features and man-made structures that decorate the Cape. “I like the idea of things aging or the natural process of how as we age, our skin gets more texture,” Kunmann says. “Houses on the Cape get covered with moss, and they get gray. To me, that’s what texture is all about: the patina of the natural process of the living world.” In some of his paintings, Kundmann captures the natural erosion of the dunes on the Cape. He does not seek to present this change as a scary warning but rather highlights the beauty in the continuous evolution of Cape Cod. 

Kundmann not only focuses on the scenery’s aging process and imperfections but also showcases the passage of time’s impact on humans. Rather than painting “perfect” bodies, Kundmann finds meaning in a person’s wrinkles and smile lines. In many of his earlier works, Kundmann blurs out the human face. However, more recently, Kundmann’s portraiture repertoire has flourished. After spending much of his time in Mérida, Mexico, Kundmann longed to paint something different than Cape Cod’s dunes and beachgoers; instead, he began painting his inner circle of friends. 

His venture into portraiture launched him back into the learning phase of artistry. In contrast to his typical abstract, expressionist work, Kundmann’s portraits accurately convey the physical human. “I said I wasn’t interested in recreating reality but using shapes and forms more expressively, and especially bodies in terms of body language, creates a narrative,” he notes. Kundmann was initially nervous about stepping outside of his stylistic norms. However, he brought his developing portraiture skills to the Cape for Addison Art Gallery’s “Beyond Bohemia” exhibition in Orleans. The exhibit traced the history of Bohemian New York and its connection to Provincetown. While the content of the paintings differed starkly from those he created in Mexico, Kundmann used his prior experience to create realistic, imagined historical portraits for the show.   

Portraiture is not the final frontier for Kundmann to master. Rather, he believes he is never done learning how to paint. “No matter what I paint, I can see they are all self-portraits in a way,” Kundmann says. “Looking back, I can see what I was painting—certain subjects at certain times in my life—when at the time I was making them, I wasn’t conscious of that.” Kundmann continuously desires to push himself into discomfort and growth as he sees his paintings as a reflection of himself. “If I think there’s a subject or a way of painting that intimidates me, I probably should try it,” he concludes. 

Sarah Serota is a rising sophomore who studies journalism at Northwestern University.