Blowtorch, Beeswax and Butterflies: Mobile Artist Suzanne Damrich’s Creative Life

Mobile native Suzanne Damrich came to art through social work, technical writing and icon workshops, and now paints in encaustic wax while championing monarch butterflies.

By James Bullard

September 22, 2026 · 8:04 am Updated November 11, 2026 6 min read

Blowtorch, Beeswax and Butterflies: Mobile Artist Suzanne Damrich's Creative Life

Mobile artist Suzanne Damrich works with a blowtorch, a hot plate and cups of molten beeswax. She also plays classical piano, writes in journals, tends a garden full of butterflies and co-created an award-winning documentary about the monarch migration. To her, all of it is part of the same thing. Damrich, a native Mobilian who describes herself as someone who lives in the moment, says she believes in living a creative life and that there is creativity in each of us—we just need to be open to the opportunities to tap into it.

Her path to becoming a working artist took decades, winding through social work, technical writing, motherhood and grief before arriving at the ancient, fiery medium of encaustic painting. Along the way, she says, every experience was quietly painting a path toward the creative life she had always wanted.

A Childhood Steeped in the Arts

Damrich’s father was a well-known Mobile veterinarian, and her mother, who was fluent in French, taught in her later years. She said growing up they took her to the symphony, the opera, and they traveled widely; the home was filled with art and they had a wonderful personal library. She adored music and studied classical piano with the Tonsmeire School of Music for five years, and they were exposed to the arts at an early age, which positively impacted her life.

She attended Auburn University, where she majored in social work. On the day she graduated, she married Dr. Michael Damrich, a cardiovascular surgeon. His residency took the couple to Houston, where she was hired to write technical manuals for Hewlett-Packard. She considers that job her first real step into a creative life, saying it took a lot of creativity to transform those dull technical manuals into something entertaining.

After seven years in Houston and a short, eye-opening stint in Saudi Arabia for Michael’s work, the couple moved home to Mobile to raise their family. She was not yet making art the way she had dreamed, but she had begun to see how each chapter was leading her there.

Painting Until Daybreak

With her husband’s demanding schedule, Damrich stayed home with their children. She said once they were school-age she secretly began buying paints. She would go to bed early after the children were asleep, and when the inevitable midnight emergency call came for Michael, she would find herself wide awake and painting until dawn.

She admits she was clueless about what she was doing. She would find a picture of something she loved and copy it. Then she took her first art class from B. Tucker. She said it was fabulous and she was hooked.

As she painted, she discovered that her many interests fed one another. She said as she painted thoughts would pop into her head, ideas that otherwise would lie dormant, and she would jot them down in her journal. Or when stuck with a particular aspect of painting, she got the urge to run to the piano and play for a while, which somehow reconnected her emotionally to what she was trying to paint. If that didn’t work, she would stroll outside and work in the garden. She laughs that to an outsider it probably looks like she spends her day running in circles, but it works for her.

Icons, Gold Leaf and the Stations of the Cross

For years, Damrich attended icon writing workshops at Camp Beckwith, the Episcopal retreat center on Weeks Bay in Baldwin County, and at the Visitation Monastery in Mobile. In the Eastern Christian tradition, icons are said to be “written” rather than painted, following centuries-old methods and symbolism.

She said those times were restorative, gazing at inspirational images and learning how to paint in that traditional method; in particular she loved learning how to apply gold leaf, and she would paint duplicate icons over and over and give many away to friends or strangers because she was painting for sheer enjoyment.

She kept taking every class she could fit in. She said she had a great group of like-minded friends who were just as eager to learn as she was, and they either brought teachers to Mobile to teach them or traveled to them.

In 2010, both of her parents died within six months of each other. She said they were her mentors for her creative life and they often spoke about developing intuition. In 2011, Dauphin Way United Methodist Church commissioned her to create a 12-image set of the Stations of the Cross as a memorial in their honor.

She said this was an emotional time and painting was a therapeutic way for her to grieve. Looking back, she says it reminded her once again that creativity had carried her through a crisis.

Playing With Fire: The Ancient Art of Encaustic

For roughly the past 15 years, Damrich has focused on encaustic painting, a technique that dates to antiquity. The word comes from the Greek for “burned in,” and the method involves painting with heated wax mixed with pigment. Some of the best-known surviving examples are the Fayum mummy portraits from Roman-era Egypt, which have kept their vivid color for nearly 2,000 years. The medium saw a modern revival in the 1950s, most famously through Jasper Johns, whose flag paintings used encaustic.

Damrich first heard about encaustic at an icon workshop. She said the oldest image of Christ is encaustic, over 1500 years old, and she told herself she would one day learn how to use the medium. The famous sixth-century icon of Christ Pantocrator at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai is one of the oldest surviving icons and is painted in encaustic.

Her tools are a blowtorch and a hot plate holding cups of oil pigment dissolved in hot beeswax. She is quick to add that no bees are harmed; the wax is the natural byproduct of the honey gathering process. She brushes the hot, colored wax onto a rigid surface as she would with any other paint. As it cools, it is easily manipulated with the torch and the colors meld together in unexpected ways. At this point, depending upon the subject, sometimes she carves into the wax to create the image.

In other words, she literally plays with fire.

A Garden for the Monarchs

Damrich is also known for her butterfly garden. She said she grows lots of different plants but butterfly gardening is her favorite. She has designed butterfly gardens for several friends who share her concern about the disappearing habitat of the monarch butterfly, an important pollinator whose declining numbers have drawn endangered-species concern.

She said the monarch is the poster child for all pollinators. Monarchs make one of nature’s most remarkable journeys, migrating between overwintering grounds in Mexico and breeding areas across the United States and Canada. She said what you do for the butterfly restores the habitat for all pollinators.

Along with Farin Whatley, she created The Mystical Migration of the Monarch, a film that premiered at the Crescent Theater in downtown Mobile. The response was so strong that they were encouraged to enter it in film festivals, where it won several awards and led to a trip to Mexico to document the migration firsthand. The film was expanded into a documentary that is available on YouTube.

For Gulf Coast gardeners who want to follow her lead, the basics are straightforward: plant native milkweed, the only plant monarch caterpillars eat, along with a variety of nectar-rich flowers that bloom from spring through fall, and avoid pesticides. The Gulf Coast is an important stopover for monarchs moving through on their fall migration toward Mexico.

Awe and Wonder

Damrich radiates positive energy, and she describes creative living as both exhilarating and restorative. She said painting is often a solitary pursuit and therefore contemplative; when you are at your best you are creating images from a place deep in your heart, and there is a certain level of risk exposing your innermost feelings. She added it is gratifying when someone connects to your art.

She has shown work in juried exhibitions in Chicago, Nashville and Atlanta. Her solo show at Sophiella Gallery in Mobile, as of 2023 her most recent, carried a title that sums up her outlook: “Awe and Wonder.”

She said being creative puts her in touch with something mystical and benevolent which sustains her, causing her to dwell in a space of awe and wonder; she likes being curious about life—there is so much to be in awe of.