Hot Wax | The Art of Encaustic
Luminous colors, elusive textures, evocative depths, and excavated passages are the substances of encaustic. Encaustic is both a reminder of the passage of time, as well as a riveting witness to the presence of space, light, and mystery.
Encaustic is a mixture of beeswax and dammar crystals, the latter of which is a resin that stabilizes the beeswax. However, the mixture requires heat—the wax-resin must be kept warm and visceral for investing and applying pigment and heated for fusion of the many layers. The results are luscious surfaces that combine transparency and opacity in layers that encourage exploration and discovery.
For Amy Van Winkle, her paintings are an intuitive and spontaneous journey. With an underlying discipline, Amy creates color fields that take the viewer into a specific space and atmosphere.
“My paintings aren't complicated, but yet they're full of memories and emotions. In my early artistic endeavors, I found comfort in creating pieces that were very linear and controlled, a stark contrast to my always-chaotic life of work and travel.” Just as Van Winkle has grown and evolved, so have her paintings. The unique qualities of the beeswax in the encaustic process of her paintings becomes a dialog of fused layers with transparent and opaque details. She builds up many layers and selectively scrapes, incises and scars the surface creating a visual archival history.
Martha Rea Baker moved to Santa Fe in 2006 and began experimenting with encaustic and mixed media wax technique. “The advantage of encaustic and cold wax is the seductive glow of color I achieve through the layering process,” she says. “I’m inspired by the strata of geology exposed in canyon walls and distant vistas such as those found in Galisteo Basin.” Ultimately, the underlying theme of her work is time. “Its passage and its effect on nature,” she says. “I seek a time-worn look—the results of erosion, weather, and the marks of previous civilizations.”
Mary Long was born in Ohio and has lived in Tennessee since the mid-1990s. Following studies in graphic design and painting, she began working in encaustic in 2001. “I grew up near Canton, where there is a crazy-quilt patchwork of rural farms and factories. It’s a juxtaposition of architectural grayness against expanses of happy saturated colors that inspires my work to this day,” she says. Long often begins her paintings with marks drawn in oil stick, over which she applies 12- 20 layers of wax combined with oil paints. “I scrape down in between the applications, revealing some of the marks, while leaving others faded or hidden in little worlds that have an element of history to them. The paintings begin in what I call a chaotic, adolescent phase and grow as layers of color and additional lines weave the elements together.” Admitting that the paintings are reflections of her own interior life, Long adds that the world is a place where things may be immediately understood alongside those that are intentionally illusive.