Crystalline Blue, 2012

Janise Yntema  

Janise Yntema is an American painter born on March 29, 1962 in New Jersey. She studied at the St John the Divine Stoneyard Institute and then at the Art Students League in New York in 1979. From 1980 to 1984, she studied at the Parsons School of Design where she got a degree in Fine Arts. She currently lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.

Working with an old technique using wax (beeswax), her paintings are created from numerous layers of translucent applications of pigmented wax which are merged with a blowtorch to create a smooth and shiny surface, like skin. Yntema has used for her works marble powder, aluminium, iron powder, wood and wax. She said in 1996 that her work " Makes reference to figuration and landscapes, but it is abstract and abbreviated to include the initial intensity of the physical gestures"

She has done solo exhibitions in New York and throughout the United States as well as in London, Amsterdam and Brussels. Her works are part of collections and of several museums in Europe and in the United States, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.