Encaustic Art What do the ancient Egyptians and a travel iron have in common? Melted wax!
No, this is not some aberration, but a connection between modern art techniques and one of the oldest forms of painting.
Encaustic is a technique f painting with molten wax. Pigments are blended with beeswax and applied to a prepared surface. In ancient times this could have been wood, cartonnage or linen.. Today it is easiest on glossy card, although silk, fabrics and wood are still used.
Today's encaustic paintings are, for the most part, abstract and fantastic. The use of molten wax enjoyed a revival back in the 1990’s and it has an immediacy and controlled randomness that attracts many artists.
The colours are very pure and brilliant, drying to a textured surface not unlike enamel in appearance, and very beautiful.
Encaustic requires the use of a heated palette of some description. The modern artist may well use a small travel iron and a stylus similar to a soldering iron with which to paint.
Through a window...
It is cold and grey here today… the weather is being very English, with that insidious, almost invisible rain that soaks you to the skin. The tables of the chocolaterie are deserted on the pavement opposite my office window, and the temperature in here reminds me that most of this village dates back 400 years or more.
The roofs of the buildings across the street are bowed and undulating like waves. Time has broken their pride and the buildings sit with slumped shoulders huddled against the autumn chill.
Yet, they survive. Time has left its scars, yet those scars have now become soft and beautiful in our eyes. The old houses hum with quiet memory. Anne Boleyn stayed here as a young and beautiful woman, before Henry cast his eyes upon her and sealed her fate. She would have seen some of the same houses and inns that I can see from here today.
The windows, like sightless eyes reflect time and it is easy to lose oneself in the contemplation of a moment long gone.
The house across the street had an incendiary bomb through the room during the war… that old lady with her loaf of bread under her arm, crossing the street today, may have seen it fall.
Permanence and change, continuity and movement, like great tides lift and carry us along in the current of life. Separated by centuries, yet part of the human flotsam in the stream of life. Part of that continuity.
I can see my own past in the little girl trotting along with her hand in grandma's hand, my own future in grandma as she smiles fondly down.
Time, standing still and moving inexorably onward, tracing the spiral.
I was, and I will be, but right now, I AM, and there is no difference between them, only the angle of perception.
Yours...
Yours were the lips that breathed against mine,
Sharing the warmth of desire in the darkness
Sharing the chill of a winters morning, laughing,
Like children, untrammelled by fear
Or the mendacities of survival.
Yours was the touch that opened me to fire,
To the conflagration of self, the immolation
of passion
On an altar of self sacrifice and world denial,
Willing victim of the deepest blaze,
Consuming consummation.
Yours were the eyes, blue as the glacial ice
That bound me in flame and warped my
perception,
Focussing my vision on the single point of your heart,
Blinding me with tomorrows that drew me inwards,
Drowning in the moment’s purity.
Yours was the joy of tender awakenings,
Feathered caresses in the dawn glow of slumber,
Golden in the mornings with the suns kiss,
Jealous of the shadows that hid your face
Beneath the duvet.