For the Journal

      What's hanging on the walls of City Hall is none of your beeswax. It's the beeswax and other types of wax used by six local artists in a new exhibit called "Wax Works." Curated and produced by the Somerville Arts Council, Wax Works features a form of presentation called encaustic.

     Encaustic is the name for both a medium, pigmented wax, and a process, painting in layers of pigmented wax. From the Big Dig-inspired work of Tracy Spadafora to the works in Riki Moss' "Barcelona" series, which look like topographical maps of deserted planets, the works are not what most people think of when they think of wax. They're less like sculptures of famous people like you would find in a wax museum and more like three-dimensional paintings on canvases.

     Arts Council Program Manager Rachel Strutt said the council decided on the encaustic medium because it is becoming something of a movement in the city.

     "The medium is well represented, as a tour of Somerville Open Studios will reveal the first weekend in May," she said.

     And Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone warmed up to the works rather quickly. One of the pieces he chose to put up in his office was a mixed-media work by Laurinda Bedingfield featuring a rendering of a street in Gaeta, the Italian village where his mother grew up.

     "I've been on that street many times, and the way it's represented here just brings me back to it every time I look at it," he said.

     When Curtatone came into office, he knew he wanted more for the décor, so he called upon the Somerville Arts Council for help.

     "We're capitalizing on one of our greatest assets here, and that's the arts," said Curtatone at the exhibit's opening. "We plan to keep showcasing great local art."

     Public Information Officer Lucy Warsh said choosing the works was a fun process.

     "When we arrived in January, we knew we needed some more color here, and they brought in all these paintings, and it was really like picking candy out of a candy store," she said. "It really brightens things up."

     The artist who began most of the brightening up is Spadafora. She began working in the encaustic medium eight years ago and has become a renowned encaustic teacher, even tutoring some of the other artists featured in the exhibit.

     All of Spadafora's work in the "Wax Works" show features maps of the Big Dig project buried beneath layers of colored transparent wax, in which engravings of more natural elements such as plants and flowers are imbedded in colored ink. Spadafora's work creates the illusion that the plants have been given permission to do what they please above the highway, but they still loosely follow the patterns of the maps that lay layers and layers beneath them.

"Lawn Ornaments" by Tracy Spadafora shows blooming flowers etched into wax layers above Big Dig maps.

     "It's the theme of Man vs. Nature, and more specifically of urban sprawl," said Spadafora at the opening.

     Spadafora described encaustic as "a very forgiving medium."

     "You can build onto it or scrape it away as you like," she said. "I use razor blades and Exacto knives and I rub oil paint into the surface."

     All of the artists seemed to have slightly varying methods.

     Bedingfield, who studied under Spadafora, is trained in printmaking, so she combines the two mediums in her encaustic work. She is known to bury small objects within the layers of wax.

     "It can be very sculptural," she said.

     Riki Moss said she got into encaustic painting after returning from a trip to Barcelona, when she was greeted by a group of her own unsatisfactory paintings.

     "I had to get all of these pieces ready for a show, so I just slammed over about 54 paintings with wax," she said. "It really opened up a whole language for me in my head. It's a fabulous medium and extremely seductive with all of its sensual elements."

     The work of Leika Akiyama also evokes a sensual side. The layers are applied neatly and evenly textured like X-ray vision inside a well-built cake. The geometric presentation is deceptively complex in the way that the shapes are so recognizably simple.

     The works in Sarah Sentilles' landscape series in the "Wax Works" exhibit evoke an apocalyptic feeling with their stark simplicity. A scratched sky of maize rains down upon a red waxy lava.

     "I just love how little you need to make a landscape," she said.

     Sentilles also said she loves encaustic for two pragmatic reasons.

     "It dries immediately and you never have to wash brushes," she said.

     Renée de Montaigne takes advantage of the transparent three-dimensional properties of working with wax to translate her work "Out There," which features a bloody red heart inside a rib cage.

     "Wax Works" will hang in the main lobby and upstairs in the Mayor's offices through April 15. City Hall is open Monday through Wednesday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., on Thursday from 8:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. and on Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. For more information, call the Somerville Arts Council at 617-625-6600, ext. 2985.