Once ubiquitously used in classical Greek painting and
sculpture, the wax-based medium of encaustic was all but forgotten in the
centuries that followed the fall of Greek and Roman culture. Despite some
experimentation in the 18th and 19th centuries, the medium
remained little more than an antiquarian curiosity until the 20th
century, when a number of modern artists, including Robert Delaunay, Antoine
Pevsner, and Diego Rivera began to experiment with its unique qualities. The
fact that wax required no drying time, and the structural properties that
allowed it to be textured and built up in relief enticed both painters and
sculptors to employ encaustic using both traditional techniques and improvising
new applications of the medium.
Earlier
attempts to revive encaustic had failed to solve the one problem that had made
painting in encaustic so laborious — the melting of the wax. It is an irony of
our modern age, with its emphasis on advanced technology, that a painting
technique as ancient and involved as encaustic should only receive more
widespread interest once the advent of portable electric heating implements and
the variety of tools made the use of encaustic more accessible.
But the
problems these early painters faced should not be underestimated. Until more
recently, literature on technique has been minimal. How to apply and fuse the
paint, what kinds of supports and types of grounds to use, what the properties
of the materials are, how to achieve any of the myriad effects that encaustic
allows, how to work with it safely, and especially, how to make one’s own
encaustic paint (since ready-made was generally not available) were largely left
for the artists to figure out. Most of the modern artist handbooks devoted to
it no more than a few tantalizing pages of rudimentary explanation.
Word-of-mouth was a more common, but not necessarily safe or reliable source of
information. Al Held tells of being taught encaustic in the 1950s by an
enthusiastic Franz Klein, shortly after which Held burned his own studio down.
Techniques
that we take for granted today were not always evident. Rifka Angel, considered
the first encaustic painter in the U.S., used for nearly 50 years a method that
by today’s standards seems almost excruciatingly difficult. Angel mixed pigment
into hard, high melting-temperature waxes, applied them painstakingly to her
paintings with thin paint knives, and fused the paint with a non-electric iron
heated on her stove.
Such difficulties did not dampen
the spirits of enterprising artists – it is, after all, the artists themselves
who develop the materials and techniques of art in the first place.
Contemporaries of Angel, such as Jack Levine, Hyman Bloom, and Karl Zerbe were,
in the 1930s and 40s, well-known pioneers of the fabled medium.
Zerbe, who is often considered
the father of encaustic painting in America, was the head of painting in the
Fine Arts Department at the Boston Museum School from 1935 to 1954, where he
influenced a large number of future artists and teachers to work in encaustic.
Among these were David Aronson, Reed Kay, and Bernard Chaet. In 1949 Frances
Pratt and Becca Fizell wrote Encaustic: Materials and Methods. The book
contained a lengthy history of encaustic and descriptions of the processes and
formulas of current encaustic painters in the United States. Write-ups on
encaustic began to appear in periodicals. One such article caught the eye of a
young Jasper Johns, whose embrace of encaustic throughout his career helped to
usher in encaustic as a legitimate modernist painting medium.
First commercial encaustic paint
The lack of a commercially
manufactured encaustic paint was another obstacle preventing its widespread use.
Any artists who were enticed by its exotic properties – its immediate “drying,”
its unmatched permanence, and the jewel-like quality it imparted to the pigment
– had to resort to making the paint themselves. Pratt and Fizell’s accounts of
the encaustic methods at that time encompass a wide variety of mineral,
vegetable, and insect waxes in combinations ranging from saponified waxes to
oil/wax and wax/resin blends often incorporating turpentine and other solvents.
Some of these formulations were variations of oil or tempera painting rather
than encaustic, and many were unsafe.
Pratt and Fizell themselves played a direct but little
known role in the eventual development of a commercial encaustic, when sometime
in the latter 1940s, while writing their book, they encouraged a small art
supply store in New York City to begin carrying encaustic materials. The store,
Torch Art Supplies on West 14th Street, had been run since 1929 by
Pauline and Joseph Torch. They specialized in carrying high quality papers, raw
materials, and their own brand of oil paint. The Torches took Pratt and
Fizell’s suggestion to Dair Color Laboratories in Brooklyn, and with Dair
devised a formula based on beeswax and damar resin, a formula that was much
safer than some of the previous formulas since no solvents were used. Dair
manufactured the paint in bulk, which the Torches then remelted in the basement
of their home in Yonkers and poured into wax-paper lined wooden molds to form
4-inch long sticks, which were then scored by hand so that sections of the stick
could be broken off. Torch’s encaustic came in 23 colors. The store also
carried a specially made 12” x 17” electric hot palette with 17 small color
wells. Except for a German company’s brief attempt at manufacturing encaustic
in the early 1920s, Torch’s paint represented the first time ever that
ready-made encaustic was available on the market.
My own experience with
encaustic began some 35 years later, first as a painter, then as Torch’s paint
maker. By that time the initial interest in ready-made encaustic had dwindled.
Only a few colors remained, no paint having been made since the early 1960s. But
encaustic was beginning to gain in popularity, and the Torches’ sons, Jerry and
Al, along with their manager, Ilene Kischel, thought that interest in their
paint could be rekindled. Since I was the only one there painting in encaustic,
I became by default the resident encaustic expert and was therefore recruited to
write an updated instruction sheet and to make the new batches of paint. This
was to be accomplished, I was told, by stirring pigment into the molten wax and
resin. I was given the “secret” formulas and faithfully followed the
instructions, melting the wax and resin in a pot in my kitchen oven and
combining it with the pigment (not very safely) in my studio in the next room by
means of a wooden cooking spoon. Muffin tins served as the new molds.
Needless to say, the method was
wasteful and inefficient. Much of the pigment simply fell to the bottom. The
main problem, of course, was that it is impossible to grind the pigment into the
hot wax the way one does with handmade oil paint, whereby the pigment is ground
into linseed oil with a slab and muller. The original Torch encaustics had been
made with high-speed paint mixers, so a switch was made to using standard
kitchen jar blenders.
In 1987 Torch Art Supplies lamentably went out of business,
and R&F was formed the next year to continue the production of encaustic. The
blender jars were replaced by mills for making the paint, and more careful
formulations were developed. This resulted in a much finer encaustic, because
milling, in which the paint passes through the pressure of grinding wheels or
rollers, breaks down the pigment and distributes it more evenly throughout the
medium.
Within a few years,
a number of specialty stores around the country and in France were carrying
R&F’s encaustic paint. As the business grew, the need for bigger and less
expensive space led to a move to the Hudson Valley in 1990. Around this time,
Jim Haskin joined me, eventually becoming my partner in the business. Together
we expanded the number of colors we made (now 80 colors), computerized our
operation, hired more paint makers, and expanded our activities. The chief
requirement for anyone to work at R&F was to be an artist oneself. Many of these
artists were (and are) graduates of the neighboring schools – SUNY New Paltz,
Bard College, and Marist College. While our policy provided meaningful,
art-related jobs for artists, the participation of these artists became in time
crucially important to R&F as we began to evolve beyond the singular activity of
making paint.
Development of encaustic workshops
In 1995, we relocated once again
to the Millard Building in Kingston, which had been built as a Ford Model T
showroom in the 1920s. The much larger space allowed us to address a need that
was growing ever more imperative. By making the paint commercially available, we
were creating a demand for technical information and classes in encaustic
technique and safe working methods. We taught our first workshops at the Women’s
Studio Workshop in nearby Rosendale, then set up a large studio facility in our
own space, just off from our factory area. Almost immediately, our monthly
weekend workshops attracted participants from all around the United States and
Canada, as well as from the vibrant art community of the Hudson Valley itself.
Many of our original
teachers started out as our paint makers, who, as artists, had begun working in
encaustic themselves. Initially they demonstrated the techniques that they had
developed in their own work. But our encaustic agenda broadened significantly
under the guidance of Cynthia Winika, our workshop director, along with
significant contributions from Laura Moriarty, and as the growing number of
workshop participants added bits of knowledge from their own disciplines –
artists who knew carving, casting, modeling, etching, lithography, silk
screening, photography, ceramics, gold leafing, painting and drawing in various
media, collage and assemblage, mosaic and bookmaking gave a whole new spin to
encaustic. We found ourselves not only teaching the participants, but also
learning from them. Our workshop program was becoming more than a mere
classroom, it was turning into a clearinghouse of encaustic technique. Through
the workshops, other artists’ methods in encaustic (and just about every other
medium) have been incorporated into a body of knowledge that is being
continuously organized and refined in an ongoing process.
Contemporary encaustic has
emerged as a deeply collaborative medium. In an exciting series of recent
projects, R&F has set up joint workshops with non-profit arts organizations. Our
schedule this year includes photography/encaustic workshops with the Center for
Photography in Woodstock and papermaking/encaustic and printmaking/encaustic
workshops, both with Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale. Future workshops
will be conducted with collaborators from a wide diversity of fields, further
expanding the borders of encaustic’s possibilities.