Yesterday encaustic artist Joy Matthews drove here from her home near Albany, Georgia to demonstrate how she melts wax into art. About a dozen of us at the LeMoyne Center for the Visual Arts watched Matthews cook cupcakes of beeswax, add a resin hardener, stir dabs of color from oil paint, and brush it onto birch, where the wax hardens faster than an egg on a skillet. Then she took a blowtorch to it.
If I concentrate on kitchen metaphors I love encaustic. The studio smells like a candle at Christmas, while images emerge like figures in a dream. And the blowtorch -- which serves to fuse layers of wax -- is, after all, the same gas flame that I light on the stove without incident each day. Yet there's something daring about encaustic art. The beeswax turns caustic if it smokes. You could burn the house down if you're careless.
You can see Matthews' work at the Wiregrass Gallery Artist Cooperative in Thomasville.
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| Matthews paints a layer of orange beeswax over her gessoed birch panel |
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| Carving tools cut designs into the wax |
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| Dabs of oil paint leach oil into paper towels, leaving pure pigment to mix with beeswax |
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| Pouring and brushing a new layer of color |
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| Tilting the board creates wave-like rises in the wax |
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