Meet the Artist Who Minds His Own Beeswax

Appropriately, the work of art that’s generating some of the most buzz at Berkshire Botanical Garden’s multi-part “Symbiosis” art exhibition this summer is a stunning piece called “Neter,” made from beeswax, honey and propolis.

The distinguished artist, LeRone Wilson, who lives and works in New York City, has been minding — and heating and sculpting — his own beeswax for two decades now, since the day he walked into an art supply store and was given, free of charge, a trash-can-size barrel of unused craft wax of which the store owner was preparing to dispose. 

A graduate of the University of Illinois-Chicago’s School of Art and Design, Wilson took the wax back to his studio, set up a series of skillets, cranked on the range, opened the windows for ventilation and began melting and mixing mediums to create impressive natural works with wax that are as much sculpture as they are paintings.

In the process, he’s received steady confirmation that his chosen vocation and medium was a matter of fate. Proud of his African heritage, Wilson notes that only after he began working with beeswax did he learn that beeswax was used in paintings dating back thousands of years ago by the Kemetic people in what is present-day Egypt.

A father and husband, Wilson has not always had an easy go of it. In pursuing his artwork, he initially encountered financial hardships. But like wax mixed with the hardening compound produced by bees known as propolis, Wilson doesn’t break down so easy. Sales of his works have since been robust.

“I’ve been through the fire, and I was never burnt,” he says. “I want my work to represent just that.”

A finalist for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and winner of Best in Show for the Carroll Harris Sims Award, Wilson has since shown his works in galleries around the country, including Rush Arts, Kim Foster, Boccara Art, White Box and G.R. N'Namdi in New York and Chicago; the Scope Art Fair, in Miami; Cutlog Art Fair, in New York; among others. 

He won the 2011 Bombay Sapphire Artisan Award, given during Art Basel Miami week, beating out 4,000 artists from across the country. In 2019, he was featured in the Special Projects section of Art New York and was invited to participate in the Pierce and Hill Harper Foundation Artist Residency in Detroit. Wilson’s works have also appeared in live auctions and shows at Phillips DePury and in museum shows, including the Museum of Biblical Art in New York and the African American Museum in Dallas. Several corporate and private collections across the world include his work.

Further confirmation came when the art collector and curator Beth Rudin DeWoody was introduced to Wilson’s artwork. She requested he create a piece specifically for “Symbiosis,” of which she has served as curator. The work, “Neter” (an Egyption word for “God”) is hexagonal, 41 inches in diameter and visually striking.  

“I create my work by first melting a mixture of beeswax, carnauba wax, resin and powder pigment, which I then make all one solvent,” he explains. “I apply the solvent to a panel with an assortment of palette knives to build up the surface, then I fuse each layer with heat. After the wax is completely hardened, I use carving tools that I created to make specific patterns into the wax. The process is very physical, time consuming and extremely detailed. The result is a minimal, translucent and highly texturized surface that fully engages all of the senses.”

The process, in fact, is modeled after that of bees themselves in their formation of hives. In the case of bees and their hives, the heat that does the fusing is the sun itself. 

“Neter” has easily become the most talked about and admired piece in BBG’s “Symbiosis” four-part indoor/outdoor exhibition, which continues through Oct. 30. In accord with BBG’s “Symbiosis” theme for the year, Wilson’s piece seeks to draw attention to the critical balances that hold the natural world in place, particularly the key role pollinators play as nursemaids for flora and critical food supplies. 

Wilson has studied bees and worked with beekeepers. He speaks of an experience a few years ago — a spiritual experience that further confirmed for him that he was on the right artistic path. 

He was handling a hive and the hive slipped from its stand. Confused, the queen bee flew from the hive to Wilson’s hand. Soon he was swarmed by worker bees, presumably to protect the queen bee, he says. Probably because he already smelled like wax, none of the bees stung him.

“It was like this validation that they gave me,” he says. “The whole experience was peaceful, like a gift given to me from the ancestors. It was just an overwhelming feeling of spiritual inspiration that the gift I have came from my ancestors. None of this work I do is on my own.

“What I take from all of this is that I have a calling to help save the bees while I’m still on this planet,” Wilson says. “I want my kids and my kids’ kids and so on to all pay attention to nature and understand it in the light of how I have come to understand it.”

LeRone Wilson will have a solo show, “Universal Connection,” at Palo Gallery, in Manhattan (35 Bond St.), 6-9 p.m. on Oct. 14, 2022.