“Suspended Belief” is among the works by Kellie Weeks in an exhibition opening Thursday at a Framingham gallery.

By Nancy Shohet West GLOBE CORRESPONDENT MARCH 06, 2014

The most accurate word to describe how Kellie Weeks talks about her art may be “rhapsodizing.” Encaustic is an art form that traces its roots to ancient Greece, but it fell out of favor for many centuries before being rediscovered by American artists just in the past couple of decades.

“I’ve been a full-time artist since 2005, and my focus has long been on painting and print-making,” said Weeks, who has a studio in West Concord. “But in 2007, I took a workshop in encaustic and fell in love with it: the luminosity, the texture, what you can do with it. I never looked back.”

Encaustic, as Weeks explains, is a process in which beeswax pigment and resin are fused in layers.

“Each layer adheres to the layer beneath it. It can be applied to anything from birch board to ceramic to plaster,” Weeks said about the medium featured in “Fabrications,” her show opening Thursday at Fountain Street Fine Art in Framingham.

“The piece that started the series I am exhibiting is called ‘Transient,’ ’’ Weeks said. “It is a very rich red piece. Red tends to be a color I gravitate toward. My work is very vivid, and I think of myself as a colorist, in a sense.”

But the art created by the Fitchburg resident isn’t merely about different hues found on the rainbow spectrum.

“My work is mostly about relationships,” she said. “This series was a very intuitive process. It was a very emotional series, representing a response to something that was going on in my life over the course of the year that I was working on it.

“I would start each painting making marks and then responding to those marks, and then adding color and responding to the color. Each piece would reveal itself to me as I created it; I didn’t know what it was about until it was done. The pieces are all about the boundaries that we build around our relationships, and how sometimes those boundaries become confusing and distorted,” Weeks said.

“Kellie’s work has a richness and depth to it,” said Marie Craig, codirector of the gallery in the Bancroft Building at 59 Fountain St. “Kellie keeps trying new things, experimenting with color and pattern and becoming more true to her vision.”

Her exhibition comprises about 40 pieces that range in size from 8 square feet to 30 square feet. It will be on view through April 6, with an artist’s reception Saturday from 5-7 p.m. and an artist’s talk slated for March 22 at 2 p.m.

For gallery hours or other information, call 508-879-4200 or go to www.fountainstreetfineart.com.

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Framingham exhibit features encaustic art