This book includes images of the work of several
contemporary artists, including Tremain Smith.
The Art of Encaustic Painting: Contemporary
Expression in the Ancient Medium of Pigmented Wax
(Watson-Guptill, 2001)
When I interviewed Jasper Johns in 1986, he
remarked rightly of encaustic,
"It's an archaic medium, and few people use it." Throughout
the 1950s and
1960s, he was virtually its sole practitioner, and at the time
we spoke, just a
handful of artists had gone beyond experimenting to create a serious
body
of encaustic work. Yet now, a decade and a half later, thousands
of artists
— impelled by the zeitgeist, the luminosity, or perhaps simply
by the recent
availability of good tools and materials — are exploring
the possibilities of
expression in pigmented wax. What a sweet irony it is that at
the beginning
of a new millennium, when cyber images are generated at the speed
of light
as pixels on a screen, a laborious medium that flourished over
2000 years
ago should once again become a hot commodity.
And hot is the appropriate word here, for encaustic,
from the ancient Greek
enkaustikos, means "to heat" or "to burn."
Heat is used at every stage of
encaustic painting. The medium consists of beeswax melted with
a small
amount of resin; it becomes paint when pigment is added to the
molten wax.
What makes encaustic unique — indeed, what makes encaustic
encaustic
— is the application of heat between layers of brushstrokes.
Heat binds
each layer to the one set down before it, so while the image may
consist of
discrete compositional elements, structurally the entire surface
is one
carefully crafted mass, a whole ball of wax, if you will.
--From the book's introduction, "The Apian Way."
I wrote The Art of Encaustic Painting after researching
what I needed to know to make my own encaustic
paintings better. It's the first commercially published
book on the subject in over 50 years, and the only volume
currently available that offers a comprehensive
presentation of encaustic: a foreward by critic Jerry
Cullum; a historical overview, with Fayum portraits; a
gallery of contemporary work — over 100 art images
(most full page, and all in color) by dozens of artists; a
technical section that includes information on materials,
safety, painting preparation and painting techniques; plus
advice from museum professionals, art dealers, and many
of the artists who are represented in the book. There's
also an interview with Jasper Johns. I wrote this book for
artists, but I invite curators, dealers, collectors, students
and teachers to take a look as well.
Joanne Mattera
You can purchase The Art of Encaustic Painting
from amazon.com It's also in bookstores.