W.B. grew up painting, drawing, and sculpting and in general making everything she could with her hands. There was never a question in her mind about whether she was an artist. She pursued traditional fine art training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Among the prizes and grants from the Academy, she won a coveted Scheidt Travel scholarship which she used for two months travel in Europe to see art and architecture.
She continues to use her classical training in her art practice. You can see it in her ability to draw and paint the world around her. She favors painting movement and enjoys the strokes of paint for themselves as well as the image she is creating. Works are most often created with charcoal, conte, oil pastel and encaustic. Encaustic is her big love, she relishes the fast-working time of three seconds to apply the paint, and options of scraping the paint or using a torch. She appreciates the deep history of the medium, but she also enjoys painting with it in a more contemporary fashion.
