A Brief History of Encaustic Painting
Encaustic Painting
has be around since the time of the Greeks. Plutarch mentioned it in a poem in
the first century AD:
A beautiful woman leaves in the heart of an indifferent
man an image as fleeting as water,
but in a lover's heart the image is fixed with fire like an encaustic
painting
that time will never erase.
In the nineteenth
century we saw a resurgence of interest in the medium. Artists tried to
recreate the recipes from the early Greek painters. They were interested
primarily in the Fayoum Portraits, funeral masks, placed on the mummified body
as a memorial.
There are still a
few of these nineteenth century recipes around - but it wasn't until the 1950's
with artists like Jasper Johns that we saw a rebirth of encaustic painting
on a major scale. This was in part, because of the use of electricity, or gas, which
made it easier to heat and apply the wax.
Many modern artists
have experimented with encaustic painting, and often incorporate areas of wax
into their paintings, but because of its labour intensity, most do not
continue.
I have worked with
wax since I stumbled upon it when doing a series of collages of my women
ancestors. I coated the images with wax as this seemed to give an authentic and
aged look to the pieces. I decided to study more about this method of painting,
incorporating oil paints, wax and pigments. I find it a truly satisfying method
of painting and it has now become almost my full time practice.