Covered from head to toe in a deep red terracotta clay at age eleven, Tom Krempa began his love of art. Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, his first introduction was ceramics at the local community center mastering the potter’s wheel. He continued his education in art through high school and college as well as private and advanced art programs.
Krempa's inspiration for art is through his observations of life and the environment around him. The responses within him manifest as excitement and creativity. The passions he brings to his work are the forces that move his internal idea from concept to completion. He sees creativity as an inward experience and process. He believes we can all imagine an outward creation, where we mold our individual environments in new and limitless ways.
Tom Krempa has won numerous awards at juried art shows nationally and internationally. His work has been shown in many exhibitions and galleries. The sculptures, "The Visitors" were displayed in Everett, Washington for 25 years in their public art collection.
Krempa started painting with acrylics on canvas many years ago and became frustrated with the flatness of two dimensions. He experimented with bulking up the acrylic paints with additives which helped create a 3-dimensional surface on the canvas. The big discovery for him came while visiting many wonderful museums in the world and viewing works by encaustic artists. The pieces he found were by contemporary artists including Jasper Johns, Arthur Dove and even Diego Rivera, to the Egyptian's Fayum burial portraits as well as the Greeks going as far back as the 5th century B.C. who used it for weatherproofing their ships.
Encaustic painting also known as hot wax painting is a process that uses beeswax, damar resin and pigment. The colors are vibrant and brilliant and will not deteriorate, yellow or darken. Encaustic paints are extremely durable, being made with beeswax. They are resistant to moisture, mildew and mold. Multiple layers of color and wax produce depth, and texture.
Being a 3-dimensional artist, his new revelation then evolved to encaustic wax painting. He discovered the dynamic textural quality he was looking for in encaustics where he now builds layers of paint creating sculptures and paintings on wood panel with 3-dimensional texture and brilliant colors. His encaustic paintings are all created on 12” x 12” panels in floater frames.
Tom Krempa's newest sculptural series "Life on a Reef" uses encaustic paints that are manipulated by scraping, rolling, carving and using paint to build multiple levels. Most pieces are solid encaustic wax sculptures mounted with steel rods that are bored into rock bases. This series of sculptures are his vision of life on an ocean reef.
Krempa’s ceramic figurative sculptural works are first conceptualized and sketched on paper to get a basic idea and form. He then uses a mid to high fire clay to produce parts using the potter’s wheel, rolling out slabs, extruding clay, building with coils, and implementing sculptural techniques. He assembles the pieces, building each figure while manipulating the clay and adding design and texture. After a low temperature firing in the kiln, he applies mostly personally developed and commercial glazes. The piece then goes back into the kiln for the higher temperature glaze firing. Many of Krempa’s sculptures are completed with the addition of bronze, steel or other metals.
