In the realm of resin art, Orcutt resident Amy Blankenship is a master manipulator.
“[Resin] can be manipulated in many different ways, just using techniques with heat and color, through different additives that you color it with,” said the local artist, often armed with a 1,000-watt heat gun when working on a project.
Through her small business, Wild Alchemy, Blankenship creates and sells a variety of decorative resin art charcuterie boards, wooden surfboards, ornaments, home goods, furniture, and more.
“I’ve done tables, chairs—really, anything with a flat surface I can put resin on,” she said with a laugh.
No matter what type of surface she’s painting on, Blankenship always has the same end game in mind: re-create the ocean, with a striking, almost photorealistic approach.
Some patrons of the artist’s products have assumed upon first glance that her wavy, sea foam-riddled images are photographs simply printed onto objects, said Blankenship, who perfected her careful approach to capturing the ocean with resin by trial and error during the pandemic.
She first took up resin art as a hobby while sheltering in place with her kids, who were attending elementary school virtually from home at the time.
“It’s great for me because I’m a stay-at-home mom—that’s my first priority—and this is something I can do while I’m at home,” Blankenship said. “I’m completely self-taught, in that everything that I know I learned from YouTube and Instagram, and just kind of experimenting. Like all forms of art, a lot of it is really just experimenting until you find what look you’re trying to achieve.”
Blankenship has a spare bedroom in her Orcutt home where she paints, and a woodworking station in her backyard to shape some of her boards.
“I don’t make every board,” clarified the artist, who also buys boards from small companies based in California, and recently started acquiring live-edge wood from a local supplier.
When Blankenship began trying her hand in resin art in 2020, ocean-themed work appealed to her the most due to her lifelong love of coastal settings. She grew up in a small town in Santa Cruz County and spent a lot of her free time at the beach.
After high school, she moved to Hawaii for a bit, before returning to California and settling down on the Central Coast with her husband and children.
“I absolutely love the ocean, and I have to be near it,” said Blankenship, who periodically displays and sells her painted wares during art fair events in Shell Beach, Morro Bay, and other shoreside locales.
She also regularly donates her scenic boards and other pieces to nonprofits, such as OASIS in Orcutt, Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA), and local schools to be auctioned off during fundraisers.
When the time came to come up with a brand name for Blankenship’s resin art business, she wanted to pick something that both encompassed the vast ocean’s wildness and signified “the spiritual transformation that this art has kind of helped me with,” she explained.
“Alchemy is a magical process of transformation and creation,” the Wild Alchemy founder said. “It seemed to fit with the type of art that I was doing, as well as the creative transformation that the art gave back to me as well.”
For Blankenship, discovering resin art and trying it out for herself was a welcomed silver lining that helped combat unwelcomed feelings of isolation during the COVID-19 crisis. She continues to find it rewarding, as an infinite pool of experimentation and creativity.
“I’ve been doing this now for four years, and every day is still a learning experience … it never ends. It’s very therapeutic,” Blankenship said. “It’s almost like a meditation because you can’t think about anything else [other] than exactly what you’re doing and doing every step correctly in order to achieve the look that I’m going for.”
Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood is subject to pier review at [email protected].
