About

Deanne Row grew up in a family of graphic artists and jazz musicians, which certainly influenced her interest in the arts from an early age. Combining the clear concepts and processes of design with the improvisations of the jazz and blues around her, her lifelong love of representational portraits and figures has become more expressive as she explores new media and techniques.

She studied French language and art at the Lycee Saint Exupery, in Bellegarde, France, then continued her focus on painting, drawing and art history at the Savannah College of Art and Design. While in college, she worked as a traditional candle carver to pay for art supplies; little did she know that wax would come back into her artistic life much later.

After college, Deanne studied to become a Picture Framer certified in conservation techniques, and framed fine art for a decade before discovering encaustic painting in a client's gallery. She fell in love with the look and feel of the bees wax, which was different from the paraffin that she had used in candle carving. As her picture framing work began to include building three-dimensional exhibition and museum displays, her artistic practice also expanded into creating assemblage pieces and sculpture.

A favorite current medium is papier mache, which allows her to meditate on the colors, patterns and editorial content of the newspapers collected to build each sculpture. Bees wax has found its way into almost all of her work, whether two or three dimensional. She still loves charcoal, oil and acrylic, and occasionally explores a theme in varied media at the same time, to allow the techniques and color palettes of each to cross pollinate the other media.