About 20 years ago, artist Marybeth Rothman found herself at a crossroads. She had grown frustrated with her oil paintings, so she began to cut them up. Something was telling the Rhode Island School of Design alumna to create a collage.

Artist Marybeth Rothman is known for her fictional biographies and abstract narratives utilizing orphaned, vintage photographs, digital photographs, encaustic paint and mixed media.

While she was losing interest in one medium, she stumbled across another. She took a class in encaustic paint, or pigmented beeswax. “I dipped my first piece of paper into the paint and that was it,” she said. “I came home, put my oil paints away and I never looked back.”

Around the same time, she inherited a box of family photos from the 1940s and started incorporating those into her work.

The stars had aligned.

Since then, Rothman has been a mixed-media collage artist and painter focusing on portrait and abstract narratives.

Now, Rothman, who lives in Closter, Bergen County, fuses together her various types of imagery, both digitally and by hand. Vintage portraits, pieces of new photographs, snippets of ephemera and her original monotype patterns all interact.

Her favorite part is assembling the collage. With the works in progress scattered on the floor, she adds and subtracts from her amalgamations. “I could do that for months, and sometimes I do,” she said.

Working with encaustic paint is key to Rothman’s practice.

In ‘I Will Never Forget Her,’ the artist fuses together various types of imagery, both digitally and by hand.

This labor-intensive product must be in a molten form to be painted. While working, Rothman keeps her pots of paint on a heated surface. With the ability to be both opaque and transparent, this paint allows her to create layers.

“I am not tired of turning my beeswax on in the morning,” she said. “It just smells so good.”

Rothman also creates monotypes using encaustic paint. When not in molten form, the paint “looks like a big crayon,” she said. “I draw onto the hot box, which is a heated surface, I burnish it onto paper, I flip the paper over, I draw on the other side and I incorporate them into my paintings,” she explained.

If the monotypes don’t suit her current piece, she’ll keep them for future use. “I’m a hoarder of my own materials,” she said.

Her vintage photograph collection is also always growing. On eBay or at yard sales, Rothman scoops up what she calls “orphaned” photos.

“I discovered that there was just an unbelievable amount of cast-off photos — whole lives,” she said. So, Rothman started reimagining their stories.

‘Theo Makes the Right Decision’ recently was in the New Jersey Arts annual exhibition in Trenton.

“It wasn’t just enough to put someone’s face on there,” she said. “Who are they? Maybe I need to change their eyes. Or, I started putting patterns on people, I put flowers, I put hats.

“So, I guess I’m a storyteller,” she concluded.

Recently, her piece “Theo Makes the Right Decision“ was in the New Jersey Arts Annual exhibition in Trenton. Currently, her piece “Paeonia” can be seen in an exhibition at Newark Liberty International Airport.

Rothman can almost always be found in her studio. “What else would I do?” she said. “I can’t see not doing this. I just love it.”

To view more of Rothman’s work, visit marybethrothman.com/portfolio/.

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2023 issue of Jersey’s Best. Subscribe here for in-depth access to everything that makes the Garden State great.