Tuesday 19 January 2010

Burn, Baby, Burn


 
One of my resolutions for this year is to get back into encaustic painting, something which I love doing but haven't really touched for about eighteen months now. Encaustic simply means 'burnt in'. When applied to art it refers to painting with hot melted wax as a medium. Additives are often mixed in to change the colour and hardness of the medium but at its simplest, as here, it can be done with natural beeswax which looks and smells wonderful and imparts a subtle golden glow to the work.

These two small pieces are on birch panels and are comprised of a number of layers of collaged papers and hot wax. The layers are built up gradually and fused together to produce paintings with lots of depth and subtle effects which show up far better 'in the flesh' than they do in photographs!

3 comments:

  1. Thank you so much for your kind comment on my blog. Wow! Your encaustics are beautiful. Will you be adding more layers? I have just bought my first encaustic painting from etsy (a tiny, litle peace). I am planning to do a little beeswax collage for the first time (yikes).

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  2. Thanks Gina!
    Actually I think I'm happy with these now and they feel finished. I'm sure you'll love the beeswax, it's kind of addictive, lol!

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