Ariel Jolie has lived most of her life on the ocean, spending her life between Florida and California, where the tides of the sea have always influenced her art. A self-taught artist, Ariel was raised in a very creative family, in which art and music were ever-present. While her brother trained in art school, Ariel began with painting watercolors of ocean life while in medical school and transitioned to encaustic painting after discovering the luminous quality of working with beeswax, which lends itself so effortlessly to water analogies. Liquid in form when painted, the wax moves in waves when heated and creates the illusion of movement. As a physician and daughter of a radiologist, Ariel combined her interest in medicine, art, and photography by incorporating X-ray photography of objects in nature. By transferring these images onto wax, these elements juxtapose the static nature of shells, skeletons, and floral imagery with the fluid nature of water and motion. Ariel currently lives on the ocean in California with her husband, Bryce, her daughter, Sydney, and their two dogs, Sierra and Sage.
