Waxing Poetic

by Sparrow, August 27, 2007

The encaustic boom is going strong. “Encaustic Works 2007,” R&F Encaustic’s biannual juried exhibition, was chosen from approximately 3,000 entries, by the artist Joan Snyder. The resulting show appears at the Gallery at R&F and at the Watermark/Cargo Gallery, both in Kingston.

Mediums of art have fashions, like musical instruments. When Winslow Homer painted watercolors in the 1890s, it was considered an amateur’s medium. Although encaustic paint—made from beeswax—has been used since ancient Egypt, more and more artists are discovering it today.

“You know what encaustic is most like? Glass,” explains Laura Moriarty, director of Exhibitions at the Gallery at R&F. “It’s something that can become molten—like lava is molten. And the moment it cools, it solidifies. And you can even capture, like you can with glass, that moment of flow. It just freezes. And the optical qualities of colored wax and colored glass are similar—you know, the way light passes through it. You can’t get that from any other paint.”

Jasper Johns is the most well-known encaustic artist. Covering the strident brightness of the American flag in a paint made from beeswax (in Flag 1954-55) is a political statement in itself. Our nation’s emblem becomes ambiguous, halfburied. “The thing that drew [Johns] to this material is that you could see every brushstroke, piled one on top of the other,” Moriarty explains.