Peter Blackmore started making art at 50 years old.
His girlfriend at the time sat him down in from of an easel, blind folded him and told him to paint.
Though he feels he has been creative his whole life, it came out as going all out at Halloween instead of painting.
“For a guy raking asphalt to be painting wasn’t a cool sort of marriage,” he said.
But now that he is old (as he called himself), doesn’t care anymore, and he can no longer do physical labour, he spends his time melting wax on canvas.
“That is why I work like a dog at the art,” he said. “For the first time in my life I am not somebody’s slave, I am doing this for me and people really dig it.”
Blackmore was first inspired to play with wax when he started picking up the grading pencils that were being thrown on the floor at work.
His first show at the Revelstoke Art Gallery was in the Sophie Atkins Room and incorporated the wax and black lights.
“I just turned into a big kid,” he said.
Since then he has become fairly serious about encaustic art, which is layering, melting and scraping different colours of wax on canvas.
Though he has taken art classes, he is self taught when it comes to encaustic art and he has been working in the medium for almost eight years.
“Now I am finally starting to get where I really understand it and I know what it is going to do,” he said. “It’s still an unpredictable medium but if you get to know kind of what it is going to do you can control it.”
Blackmore is a member of the Art First Gallery in Revelstoke.
He does his creating in his dining room studio under the supervision of his cat Dexter.
“I do it because it soothes my soul,” he said.
It isn’t about the money, but Blackmore added that he is both shocked and grateful that people buy his work.