Encaustics!!!!

Well I started my fellowship over Mother's Day weekend by taking the encaustics workshop with Kim Bernard. It was so inspiring! It felt like being back in college taking art classes again. I haven't taken many workshops or classes at all since I graduated with my B.F.A. from USM in 1995. I'm so used to being the one leading or teaching, that it was so nice to be able to listen, think and reflect for once. Kim's one big rule was we were not allowed to create works of art. We were supposed to just play and experiment. 16 hours of playing and experimenting! I never do this. I always work for a finished product. It was hard at the beginning to let go and just try something new without worrying and fretting over it. Here are some pictures from my weekend:

This was my work space. A griddle to heat up the wax, heat gun to melt the wax, vent to suck out harmful fumes.

My tools: various clay tools for scraping and incising in the wax, natural hair bristle brushes to paint the wax with, and vegetable oil to spread the oil pigment sticks around the wax.

My painting station with the encaustic sticks. I melted them straight onto the hot surface of the griddle, set at 200 degrees. The clam can is holding melted medium, which is a combination of beeswax and damar resin. Smells so good! It's hard to believe that this wonderful smell (it's fabulous too) is harmful if inhaled too much.

Preparing a wood panel. I'm painting this with melted medium in one direction, then apply heat with the heat gun, then let cool, then paint another coat in opposite directions, apply heat, and so on for a total of three times. Then the panel is ready for encaustic paint.

This panel is cooling, you can see how the bottom right hand side is still warm and not cooled. It's almost ready!

This is my first experiment, well actually my second. My first one was so bad, I heated it up and scraped the entire piece off with a razor blade. You can see here that I tried incising and inlaid approaches. I also used pigment sticks for the little scratched green lines and the black lines. I'm totally addicted to those pigment sticks.

Here are four experimental panels. The gray one is a transfer from some cool medical drawings I photocopied of the spinal cord and skull. The upper right shows incising and pigment sticks to bring out textures. The lower left has collaged pieces of wood and a ceramic textured tile. It's blah, but good practice for when I try this on more clay work in the future.
Here is a close-up of the transfer I did. I gave it to Rob, sort of as a joke about his back issues.