Arkansas Winter

2004

Encaustic and oil

18 x 36

This was my first venture into encaustics. The texture doesn't show up on the screen unfortunely. Was fun... only burned myself a couple of times. I saw a lot of encaustic work in Santa Fe galleries last summer (2003) and loved the translucent look,the depth of the encaustic work. I tried to achieve that look with a rather realistic landscape. In the encaustic process each layer of wax (a combination of bees wax and damar crystals) is torched with flame or heat gun to cure the surface. The original drawing of oil didn't move much... but each sucessive would shift with the molten wax. I carved a lot of the tree branches back into place. Makes for a lot of work... but a nice surface texture. The next encaustic (seen on the figure page) took into consideration the medium more. I used collage and build up the wax with stencels.