Hot stuff

Painting with hot wax (Encaustic Painting) is not always without risk, burn blisters became part of my life since I started experimenting with encaustics. I realised how important it is to KNOW the composition of the art materials that you are using and to know HOW to work safely. In Joanne Mattera’s book I read very useful tips and on the internet I found an Art Safety Training Guide from Princeton that I like to share with you.  (see below)

My yesterday’s experiment:

(again I started off from a hardened fabric shape on which I applied pigmented hot wax)

All there is to know about (contemporary) encaustics you can find in the following book (available via Amazon)

The Art of Encaustic Painting
Contemporary Expression in the Ancient Medium of Pigmented Wax 
Author: Joanne Mattera

From the book’s introduction, “The Apian Way”: 

“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.“

For more information about this artist:  www.joannemattera.com

The Princeton Training Guide at http://web.princeton.edu/sites/ehs/artsafety/index.htm provides basic information for working safely with chemicals and operations in Visual Arts.