But Like, Who Is She?

Meet the artist behind the heat, Cassidy Marayna Watt.

Cassidy works in encaustic, an art medium made from beeswax, damar resin, and pigment. It requires equal parts patience, heat, and willingness to let go of any and all original plans.

Working across several heated palettes, she builds each painting by layering, heating, scraping, swearing, reheating, and repeating until the surface becomes something people instinctively want to lean into and touch.

Layer. Heat. Layer. Repeat.

The process lives somewhere between precision and complete surrender. The setup can be controlled, the ideas sketched out, and the outcome still only minimally influenced. Eventually it becomes clear the wax is never really open to suggestions.

Cassidy has been making art for as long as she can remember, winning her first art contest in third grade and putting 1990 on the books as the flagship year for her future art career. Art stopped being just a hobby around age ten, when she began formally studying charcoal and pastel under muralist Ewa Pohl.

Over the years she worked with pencil, oil, acrylic, screen printing, collage, pottery, and just about anything else she could get her hands on, including toilet paper rolls, lovingly collected and delivered by friends and family with concerning consistency... but damn, do they make good art.

She spent several summers taking advanced coursework at the historic Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, Virginia, before later studying oil and gouache under contemporary artist and illustrator Nataliya Gershman.

In 2018, while living in Seattle, she turned her one-bedroom apartment into a fully functioning art studio (and for those wondering, no, she did not get her security deposit back). It was there that she started apprenticing under Laura Van Horne of Gray Sky Gallery. Laura generously taught Cassidy all things encaustic, including that a blowtorch is a perfectly reasonable thing to own. And she does, in fact, own several.

Now based in Charlotte, North Carolina, she continues chasing the moment where careful planning falls apart into something better. The wax always wins, and she's mostly made peace with that. Her work can currently be found at Queen City Art Gallery.