by Joanne O’Sullivan
photos by Steve Mann

Artists tend to get poetic when describing works in encaustic, a technique that combines heated beeswax and pigment to create a surface that simultaneously filters and reflects light. “Encaustic doesn’t need to be lit,” says River Arts District painter and sculptor Constance Williams. “It creates its own light source.”

“Encaustic pieces glow with an inner radiance,” she continues. “The sheen of the surface begs to be explored by hand.” Williams and fellow Asheville artists Celia Gray and Nicole McConville are among a growing number of artists who have worked in a variety of media and are experimenting with encaustic to brilliant effect.

Trained as a sculptor and blacksmith at Penland School of Crafts in Spruce Pine, Gray has always been drawn to techniques that intensely link the artist to the medium. But encaustic is not painting or sculpture, although it may incorporate elements of both, which, she says, is part of its appeal. It is, rather, a surface treatment, one that encourages mysterious textures between the layers of wax. Artists also may etch simple line drawings onto the surface, grounding even a strongly conceptual piece and preserving its visual connection to the artist’s hand.

McConville’s work incorporates collages of vintage illustrations and photographs and cutout stencils. “I’m getting a lot of reaction from the encaustics,” she says, especially since she’s begun incorporating natural specimens like preserved insects and birds. “They’re very much a part of me, but somehow there’s less of my soul smeared into them.”
While encaustic is hot at the moment, it’s anything but new to the art world. Ancient Greek shipbuilders developed the process, giving it its name, which means “to burn in.” They used it as a means to waterproof the hulls of their vessels: the shipbuilders later found that, by adding pigment and resin to the wax, they could make the functional beautiful, too.
Not a technique for the impatient (it takes time to melt the beeswax and build up the layers) or the pyrophobic (a blow torch, heat gun or similar tool is required), encaustic has fallen in and out of fashion with artists for centuries. But it has enjoyed a resurgence since abstract expressionist painter Jasper Johns reintroduced it to the American art scene in the 1950s. According to UNCA art professor Virginia Derryberry, encaustic has “picked up steam” in the past decade, even as scores of artists have turned to digital media. “There’s an ongoing dialogue between the handmade and conceptually derived in art,” she says.

Encaustic can be used on wooden panels, canvas, clay or even paper if it’s adhered to something sturdy enough to support the weight of the wax. To create the medium, beeswax and damar resin (a hardening agent) are heated, left clear or combined with pigment, then brushed onto the surface and fused with a heating tool to prevent cracking. Gray often paints on organic shapes and images and incises lines into the surface of the work, or builds up raised elements with opaque color. Williams embeds materials such as gauze, cheesecloth and thread between the layers, creating contrast with surface areas that are alternately smooth as glass and enticingly rough.

“Sensual” is a word that comes up a lot when artists talk about encaustic—the smell of the melting wax, the heat rising from the liquid medium and the glossy luster of a hardened surface all enhance the experience of working with it. It’s a pleasingly malleable substance—it can be worn down or built up, fused to a sleek, satiny finish or distressed with a scraping or “scribing” tool. The skin-like wax membrane is inviting to both the eye and the hand; long after a piece is finished, the surface is warm to the touch. And touching encaustic is OK. It’s a surprisingly durable medium. Despite its waxy composition, the fusing process ensures that it won’t melt unless subjected to extreme heat.

And then there’s the captivating luminous quality. Because beeswax is translucent, light coming through the wax will reflect off a light or bright-colored “ground” or pigment, creating a radiant effect. The damar resin in the medium causes even dark colors to take on a dusky sheen. An encaustic piece interacts with the light it’s seen in, achieving different effects in different places or even during different times of the day.

Works in encaustic often take time to decipher, says Reni Gower, a noted encaustic artist and an art professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. A snippet of text here, a ghost of an image there, mysterious colors and textures all allude to hidden meanings deep beneath those waxy layers. This appeals to McConville: it allows her to selectively reveal and conceal elements of the work. “My work has always been about trying to engage the viewer to look more closely,” she says. With encaustic, she’s been able to achieve in two dimensions the same enigmatic, layered quality she’s known for in her three-dimensional assemblage pieces.

Despite the complexity of the effect, each artist reports that the technique is easy to learn. Derryberry says that because of ventilation issues, few college art programs offer specific courses in encaustic—artists tend to find out about the technique from each other. Gray picked it up from colleagues at Penland and now periodically teaches encaustic workshops at BookWorks in West Asheville. After admiring fellow Asheville artist Jenny Mastin’s use of encaustic in her ceramic pieces, Williams took Gray’s class last year to learn the technique herself. McConville had been incorporating beeswax into her work for years, but only fully embraced encaustic after she, too, took Gray’s class in 2007.

In a way, Williams says, everyone has experimented with the basic concept behind encaustic in those waxy crayon drawings we all made as schoolchildren.  It’s a common memory: the reckless sensation of covering over everything with black, the delight of scraping it away to find a rainbow of color beneath.  Maybe it’s that remembrance—hidden deep in the layers of our own subconscious—that makes encaustic so instantly alluring, so poetic. If we look closely enough, we might just find a buried meaning or an unexpected, thrilling illumination.