encaustic painting n+2

i put another layer of brushstrokes on the paper towel, stuck some white around the paint blobs, put down some really thin darks around the blobs and the jars, put local color over the white i’d stuck down over the paint blobs what was i thinking, and melted it down a little. i wanted the dark stuff to run and the local color to just sag, and because the dark stuff is dark, it happened to work just fine. i see there’s a lot of planning involved. i’m better at slapdash.

did you have a real chemistry set, the kind back when you could actually mix high explosives? it was a metal box, and glass tubes, and you were only supposed to use it with adult supervision.

while jim used his to make actual explosives, i was always too impatient to follow recipes, and would always add a little of this and a little of that until all i had mixed up was a test tube of toxic waste.

i’m still like that. i learned astrology by studying transits, rather than what venus in leo means.

i got to the point where i was comfortable with the representational aspects of the painting, so i covered the whole thing with a thick layer of paste wax medium. since i’d heated it slightly all over, it had hardened, and i could gently smooth thick globs of wax over it. i stopped in process to take a reference photo. good thing it’s a digital camera. i would expire of boredom waiting until the pictures got back from the lab if it were still film. you couldn’t blog with pictures unless you wrote it all down as it was happening on gasp paper.

actually, that’s how jim does for his blog. he takes a picture, he sits in his chair and writes it out, and i type it in when i get to it. i’m such a dilatory secretary.

so now i believe all of my encaustic paintings are sitting around collecting layers of wax and curing. so i’ve been casting about for something new to do.

i’m learning specific things with this series of paintings. one is to try to use wax the way i was using silk dyes. one is to go even more abstract than i was tending to in my koi series of several years ago.  one is to do representational painting. what’s the other one? the seduction of the wax.

so my fifth encaustic painting is to do something that the wax naturally wants to do. and that’s going to be cosmic. wax is a cosmic fluid, well, anything that has a range between melting point and boiling point. the miracle of life on this planet is liquid water. if it were too hot or too cold there would be no life. so i’m exploring the range wherein life is possible, or in this case, creation.

i’m finding that making wax paintings is a lot like making bread. the yeast is alive, and the bread is an individual creature that you’re going to feed and exercise and grow up fat and happy, and then stick in the oven and make a part of your own body, its highest purpose. well, we won’t go into highest, yeast has probably a more exalted destiny than humankind.

making bread is like doing magic. it requires focus, intent, knowledge, insight, and the flow of creative enery.

encaustic painting (some number here)

this is the still life of my studio equipment. from left, paint rag (paper towel folded in 4), thick gel-like wax and turpentine (or now beeswax and citrus-flavored mineral spirits) in a jam jar, very thin beeswax and turpentine in a baby food jar, and beeswax and turpentine heavy paste in a bitty jelly jar.

my paint blobs are spread out on the glass palette in front of the jars. hansa yellow, ochre, titamium, raw sienna, naphthol red, burnt sienna, raw umber, ultramarine.

the wood grain you’re seeing at the top of the picture, representing the table the glass palette is laid out on, is the wood grain of the wood i used to make the painting on. it’s got several coats of paste wax on it at this point.

i’m struggling with the folded paper towel. in reality it’s got brushstrokes of paint, or palette knife strokes of paint, and gets ratty fast, with lots of paper towel texture showing thru. i put a few representative scrapes with the palette knife, and melted the hell out of it, until the entire square was molten and trembling in my upraised hand. (i haven’t yet taken the light off its clip and turned it upside down to melt the picture as it stays steady on the pallete. i’m still holding the painting up to the light and waving it around at varying distances from the source.

god this is fun.

i’m also struggling with the jam jar. it’s got a quilted glass surface, with the lovely creamy beeswax medium inside, and i can’t begin to recreate the translucency of the real thing. no more can i paint the liquidity of the thinned out mixture in the middle. i can’t render light coming thru something very well at all. yet.

the learning curve is deceptively steep. like silk painting, you don’t notice how much there is to learn as you quickly master the basics.

my glass palette, the palette knife i’m using to paint with (seems i’m using several different types and sizes of palette knives. i’m discovering what damned useful things they are.)

i’m starting to run out of colors again. i’ll be scraping the palette clean after messing with this painting, and start over with freshly mixed up paint, on the completely abstract experimental piece, the seduction of the wax piece.

and oh yeah i’ve figured out what to do wfor my next encaustic painting.

nebulas.

that’ll be the painting where i do something the wax naturally likes to do, instead of seeing if i can do realistic and seeing how well i can do abstract and getting seduced by the wax.

i did more things to the paper and boiled it again. i built up the piles of paint on the palette. i put on a darker coat of green blue for the glass, and then i put on a layer of wax medium over everything but the glassware, the paper, and the built-up blobs. i seem to recall doing something in the shadows of the jars, but i can’t tell by looking at my photos, because they all ended up in different colors, even tho i took them under mostly identical conditions. the light outside was changing, but we’re in a basement facing the house next door, and i use fluorescent studio lights no more than a foot above the pictures, and use a flash on the camera. but i don’t know, except for the paper and the palette and maybe the paint blobs, i’m hard pressed to say what i did with this painting session.

but wait, there’s more. now for an update on the abstract seduction of the paint.

4th encaustic painting 1

after putting a top coat of wax on the koi painting and setting it aside, i decided i needed to do a painting that was supposed to look like it was, so i decided to paint my studio equipment, a theme i revisit every once in a while, a documentation of how i work.

so welcome to my studio, hastily made-over for encaustic, which means to say everything to do with oil painting, which i was focussing on immediately before this, has been cleared aside or thrust away. you see my wax mediums in their jars – beeswax and turpentine in a gel consistency, beeswax in mostly turpentine for something very thin, and beeswax and turpentine so thick you have to carve it out to use it.

in front of these you can see my palette, such as it is. you’ve missed the stage where i was keeping all my pigments in powder form right on the palette. what you’re seeing is yesterday’s batch of pigmented wax medium, which hashardened somewhat over night, that i then mix more wax medium into until it’s like butter.

i just wanted to start the painting. i’m not sure how realistic i can get given the pasty nature of how the wax goes on. i’m not very good with the palette knife yet, and so my lines are blotchy and unsure. i may well become seduced by the wax and end up making something that bears little resemblance to something you would see with a sound mind and body.

the last thing i did before coming upstairs and getting sick from the turpentine fumes was to take one of my new woodcarving tools and scratch some of the marks i made on the palette with my knife, while painting the koi painting that i did right before starting this one.