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I am Sarah Petite, Canadian painter. I work out of studios in Fredericton, New Brunswick (winter), and southwest Nova Scotia (summer).

I have been painting professionally for forty-three years; in encaustic paint for thirty-five; in geometric abstraction for fourteen; on non-rectangular cutout panels for nine. There is still plenty to do.

Encaustic uses melted beeswax as a binder for the pigments shared by all paint mediums. Encaustic is different from, for example, oils and acrylics, in that 'wet' for encaustic, means melting-point hot; 'dry' simply means cooled. Other paints dry permanently, whereas encaustic can be re-melted, with a heat gun or blowtorch, right on the painting, to achieve many effects with tools, like knives, scrapers and trowels. Expertise with these techniques can take years of practice, especially when they are self-taught (or discovered or invented), as they were in my case.

Influenced by the virtuosity of this medium, I moved, years ago, from the representational to the abstract in my practice. Rather than bend the paint to approximate the evidence of the eyes, I would allow the paint to make its own evidence. The architecture of geometric abstraction became my stock in trade, as questions of balance, repetition, symmetry, scale and pattern were pondered again and again.

As to theme, or subject matter, I concern myself with the end result, seeing how close I can come to that elusive thing called beauty. Along with my brushes and scrapers, I have my memories of past paintings. The formal problems, presented again and again, double back or inch forward, spread out or pull in. Each painting begins with a question, and ends with a response - not always a hard answer, much less anything like closure - but absolute truth is beyond us all, and life might be dull if it were not. Each painting instructs, prods and inspires forward to the next. In most cases, through my long career, I remember clearly the order in which the works appeared.

The painting for me, and the painting for the viewer (someone not-me, looking), are not the same. It is an irony that I the painter, immersed in my own inner thoughts, armed with a repertoire of values and marks, as a musician with runs and riffs, can expect to awaken something unknown to me in someone looking at my painting. But this is the mystery of the creative process in all its forms.