Malissa Martin-Wilke is a native Texan who makes her home in Lawrence, Kansas. A triple-career kind of girl, she is a working, selling artist; a freelance writer; and president of Communities In Schools of Kansas, part of the nation’s largest dropout-prevention network (www.ciskansas.org). Malissa can be reached at malissamartinwilke@yahoo.com.
Malissa is a self-taught artist who learns by observation and investigation. She works primarily in encaustic, which is the most ancient painting medium still in use today. She makes her own encaustic paints, which are composed mainly of beeswax, damar resin, and pure earth pigments. Making her own encaustic, rather than purchasing commercial brands, gives her a great deal of control in terms of the final product, and she considers making the paints almost as much a part of the creative process as actually painting with them.
She is married to Phil Wilke, a journalist who is a blogger, a free-lance writer and editor, and a media guy over at Kansas Public Radio, having landed there after years in the daily newspaper biz. Between them, Malissa and Phil have four children, significant-others-in-law attached to two of the children, and the world’s most adorable grandbaby; an old, extremely cranky cat; and an elderly, rarely-demanding lab-mix.
