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Waxing Poetic: Encaustic Art in America during the Twentieth Century

by Gail Stavitsky, Ph.D., Chief Curator

 

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The Encaustic Art Revival of the 1980s and 1990s / Themes and Concerns: Encaustic, Archaeology, Ancient Cultures, and History

A number of artists employ the ancient medium of encaustic to evoke historical and archaeological associations and metaphors in their work. Sculptor Jim Cogswell, Associate Professor of Art at the University of Michigan, explores the origins of encaustic in his installation Parthenon Plumb Bobs. Fascinated with the pungent sweetness, amber color, luminosity, and responsiveness of beeswax, Cogswell worked directly with pure wax for a brief.period. Having heard that Greek marble sculptures were polychromed in encaustic, he turned to the medium when he received an invitation to work on a sculptural installation for the Nashville Parthenon in 1995 -- a collaboration with his sister Margaret Cogswell whose use of waxes in her mixed media sculpture he admired. He made the Parthenon Plumb Bobs, suspended in columnar configurations, as "the simplest of instruments for determining a vertical line, making visible a complex forceful, and mysterious truth, impossible to ignore..."[251] Thus they were conceived as a tribute to the ancient architects; and builders of the Parthenon which was reconstructed in Nashville, "The Athens of the South." Conscious that the original Parthenon was probably painted in brightly colored encaustic, Cogswell adapted this medium for his plumb bobs, using various combinations of pure and pigmented wax to obtain subtle variations in color and transparency. Prior to being coated with wax and sometimes shellac, these works were made out of soaked, softened books shaped around a corn cob core evoking a primary crop of Tennessee (some are topped with vinyl record disks and collaged with fragments of dry point prints). The translucency of the encaustic surfaces reminded Cogswell of marble shards, fragments of bones, or horses' hooves which feature so prominently in the Parthenon friezes. Cogswell also welcomes the alchemical associations of bees as metaphors for creativity, transforming raw material into the heavenly substances of wax and honey.

The history of encaustic as an ancient painting medium is also evoked by Carol Schwartzott's Pandora's Box. Re-telling the Greek myth of Pandora from Hesiod's Works and Days, Schwartzott constructed her book of eleven, center-cut pages that can be stacked onto a gold-leafed column and placed inside an exotic hardwood box. Each page is constructed of wood veneer laminated to an archival paper board covered with collaged words and images, embellished with gouache and watercolor on one side and an informal encaustic design on the other. Schwartzott enjoys scratching words and image into layers of flexible, brilliantly colored encaustic which she then buffs to a precious, enamel-like afterglow. The density and translucency of workable encaustic also appealed to Schwartzott who was introduced to the medium in 1994 by her daughter Gretel, who worked for Richard Frumess of R & F Handmade Paints. The concept of the page as single and unattached evoked the idea that the words of the story could be separated from the container and travel, "much in the same way that the evils of the world flew from Pandora's own box when she opened the lid."[252]

Stephanie Brody Lederman's encaustic paintings are about a more generalized notion of history through "the layering of time and image; memory overlayed with the present. [253] Rue de Paradis evokes the surfaces of walls in the city of Paris with contrasting images of pasted wall advertisements, cards, and a Romantic mannered still life comprising an "archaeology of the palpable."[254] Around ten years ago, Lederman started to use encaustic techniques, seduced by the raw sensual beauty of the impasto surfaces of some early Flag paintings by Johns. Realizing that Johns used the wax medium to embed collage elements in transparent layers, Lederman embraced this reference to process as relevant for her direct intuitive art brut style. Referring to encaustic as an intractable medium like cold molasses on a cold day, Lederman enjoys its resistance to easy virtuosity and its surprises. She employs a variety of techniques, including the use of encaustic as an underpainting that is painted over with acrylic or oil and occasionally burnished or manipulated with a heat source. Scraped, incised, and abraded, the encaustic in Rue de Paradis becomes a palimpsest surrogate for the cement walls which are covered with a mysterious, obscured notation. Although clarified on the frame, the meaning remains elusive as Lederman uses encaustic medium "to trap what words might ruin."[255] Thus Lederman has adapted encaustic to the evocative, metaphorical combinations of childlike narrative text and images -- both quirky and generic -- with which she established her reputation in the 1970s.

Ford Crull also enjoys the mysterious, mutable aspects of encaustic which supports his interest in Symbolism. Entranced with the freshness, vitality, and permanence of the Fayum portraits at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Crull began to work with encaustics around 1980. This encounter occurred at a time when he felt a need to find a way to build rich textured surfaces quickly. Experimenting on his own, Crull evolved various ways of working with encaustic. For The Wild Ones, Crull covered an oil painting on wood with a layer of encaustic. He then melted a clear layer on top which he embellished with oil and oil stick to produce a semi-transparent surface which he then burned in with a heat lamp. Captivated by the scent of the medium which reminds him of being a child in church, Crull imputes a mystical, transcendent quality to encaustic. Furthermore, its malleability supports Crull's neo-symbolist approach as, in The Wild Ones, "the slightly colored wax surfaces reveal a nether world beneath" of shifting images which never completely reveal themselves."[256] The small, hand-beaten lead frame provides a context in which the alchemical, transformative processes occur; This ambiguous space seems to appear and disappear in a purgatory-like atmosphere of enigmatic symbols, signs, words, and pictograms. Thus Crull exploits the medium's archaeological quality by incising myriad pictographic images from diverse historical and cultural sources into layer upon layer, resonant with notions of the archetypal, the collective unconscious, and the search for universal forms of spirituality.

Elyn Zimmerman finds that the solidity and physicality of encaustic suited her desire to create images based on the abstract forms of ancient ceremonial stone objects. Encaustic first attracted her as a medium when she was an art student at UCLA in the 1970s who had majored in perceptual psychology. She did not, however, turn to a sustained use of the medium until recently, after establishing her reputation with installations, earthworks, and public sculptures. These referred to ancient and modern architecture and were concerned with consciousness of place, as well as processes of perception. During the early 1990s, disillusioned with the diminishing opportunities for creating Public Art, Zimmerman began to create more personal sculptures, primarily in stone, that reflected her "private interests in archaeology and obsession with the archaic world and its societies."[257] She also experimented unsuccessfully with various media to create images of Neolithic ceremonial stone objects from all over the world that intrigued her. Having collected some examples of Native American banner stones, Zimmerman was also attracted to the simplicity of pre-cycladic Anatolian idols, as well as the jade objects from China and Japan that are the source for the Ceremonial Jades series.

Often interested in new materials, Zimmerman saw a display of R & F encaustic paints which reminded her of color stones. She found that she could practically carve the central images of the ceremonial objects, building them up layer by layer in shallow relief. In addition to its sculptural properties, encaustic appealed to her because of its slightly translucent quality. Coating the whole encaustic image with plain medium created a skin, or veil, that seemed to her to isolate the object in space and, metaphorically, in time as it sealed in the image. Thus encaustic was uniquely appropriate for Zimmerman's rendition of these archaic objects which are still appreciated today as strikingly contemporary visual icons.

As the twenty-first century approaches, many artists are turning to the ancient encaustic medium as a poetic vehicle for conveying their spiritual, philosophical, and environmental fin-de-siècle concerns. Appreciating encaustic's unique luminosity, malleability, varied textures, richness and saturation of color, they have extended the medium into varied metaphorical realms. As a transparent medium bearing skin-like properties, encaustic has often been employed as a membrane/surrogate for the human body, evoking its vulnerability and resilience. Transformed through fire/heat, encaustic is regarded as a mystical alchemical material suggesting the metamorphosis of all matter. The embedding of images and memories is associated with the build up of layers and equated with geology, archaeology, the ritual accumulation and sealing of memories, and artistic impulses. Bearing the history of its creative process, encaustic is also prized as among the most permanent of mediums that simultaneously evokes and defies the vicissitudes of existence. Encaustic's contradictory aspects -- opaque/translucent, hot/cold, liquid/solid, thick/thin, immediate/enduring -- attest to its unique potential to embody many phenomena at once. This unusual versatility constitutes its lasting appeal.


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This page was originally published in Resource Library Magazine. Please see Resource Library's Overview section for more information. rev. 5/28/11

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