Backbone > Lucid Dreaming

Slow Food for the Eye
By Beth Elaine Wilson

“I love Ted Williams because he can see faster than anybody—he can see the seams on the ball as it comes over the plate.” —PAINTER FRANK STELLA, C. 1966

The desire to see “quickly” dates back to the 19th century, when the world suddenly seemed to move onto the fast track in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. By the time Monet and the Impressionists got their project up and running, “seeing quickly” was such a pronounced feature of the environment that it only seemed natural to come up with a new pictorial language to capture the fleeting impressions of a single moment, the condition of light or atmosphere as it surrounded a subject.

It was not until the mid-20th century, however, that technology caught up with the painters, in the creation of acrylic—that is, plastic—media that dried quickly and permitted a much faster working method than is possible with oils. Ironically, an alternative that had existed for millennia was rediscovered about the same time by a young artist named Jasper Johns, who sought a way to combine newspaper collages with brushstrokes in a series of deadpan paintings of the American flag.

The new/old medium he settled on is called encaustics. The pigment is mixed with a mixture of melted beeswax and resins, and is painted on (or more properly, “burned in”) while hot. Of course the wax solidifies almost immediately, allowing the artist to work in additional brushstrokes directly on top, without risking the muddiness often produced by wet-on-wet application in other media.

After Johns and several other prominent artists resurrected the wax-based medium (which was used by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks) in the 1950s and ’60s, it began a slow but steady climb in popularity. Incredibly versatile, the semi-transparent wax medium takes quite naturally to layered images and to the inclusion of all sorts of collage and found object elements, which can easily be embedded in its surface.

R&F Handmade Paints began manufacturing encaustic paint and pigment sticks in New York City in the early 1980s. Now based in Kingston, the company takes seriously its role as both supplier and information base for those interested in working with the medium, offering workshops led by experienced artists from coast to coast. Eight years ago, R&F instituted a juried biennial exhibition of encaustic-based work, which has steadily grown with each manifestation. Over 400 artists submitted more than 1,400 slides of their work for consideration for the current Encaustic Works ’03, the fourth of these R&F sponsored exhibitions. Guest juror Tracey Bashkoff, Associate Curator for Collections and Exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, ultimately chose 86 works by 48 of the artists for inclusion in the show, which has grown large enough to need accommodation in the expansive new Marist College Art Gallery space.

Bashkoff was struck not only by the number of abstract entries, but by their high quality as well. “When you jury one of these open exhibitions, you tend to see a lot of representational work,” she reports. She found the whole experience “eye-opening,” and as a result she became more thoroughly acquainted with the possibilities of the medium. Casting aside her preconceptions, she found that encaustics didn’t always have to be sculptural or heavily textured, and was “amazed to see the medium’s translucency and range of colors” as well.

One of the more intriguing side effects of this waxy medium is the way that it can slow everything down—the light passing through the solid surface is momentarily trapped, diffused, and then slowly released. A case in point is Abby Goldstein’s Findings, which create a fascinating play on encaustic’s odd relationship to photography. Her softly modulated foliage shapes subtly imply the presence of the plant, in the form of its indexical imprint as a shadow caught within the matrix of the wax. Photography, which we usually think of as one of the “fast” media, captures its own kind of imprint, as the film’s emulsion chemically reacts to the light rays that have bounced off its subject. But instead of recording the image with the photograph’s apparent immediacy, Goldstein’s encaustics slow the whole process down, asking us to ponder a moment the nature of images themselves, and what it is that really is “real.”

Other submissions to the show mix encaustics with other media, from color woodcuts to acrylic to graphite, while others push the limits of what might be considered encaustics, mixing wax with carbon and ink to graphic effect, or creating sculptural work by coating ceramics or other substrates with wax. According to Richard Frumess, one of the owners of R&F, the whole point of the show is to pose the rhetorical question: What is the definition of the medium?

A smaller, more intense consideration of that question is central to a secondary exhibition opening November 15 at the Dutchess Community College gallery. Jokingly referred to by Frumess as the “Salon des Refusés,” the artists included are actually those considered ineligible to enter the Biennial—mostly R&F’s workshop teachers and staff. R&F office manager Danielle Correia traps colorful flurries of powdery pastel in the wax, while workshop leader Laura Moriarty has finally dispensed with the panel support of her intense, sculptural paintings by simply folding solid masses of the medium in layers of colors, as small, free-standing sculptures.

The show-stopper of the DCC show will undoubtedly be Cynthia Winnika’s “gunpowder” paintings. Taking the root meaning of “encaustic”—burning in—quite literally, Winnika has made a series of encaustic works in mixed media on paper, on which she then set off small fireworks. The imagery quite logically features Chinese figures and text elements, while the presence of the firecrackers register as re-melted sections of wax, now embedded with a pattern of blackened gunpowder cinders seared into the surface. The carefully built-up images meet the serendipitous chance effect of the firecrackers, blasting us—in the blink of an eye—from her slow, meditative creative process back to the inexorable immediacy of the present moment.