This Wednesday, I’ll be doing a 3-hour outdoor encaustic demo at the Outsiders Art gallery for their Student U fundraising event.
I’ll also be teaching encaustic painting techniques to anyone who’s interested in either learning a really, really old art medium or hot wax (so long as the interested persons aren’t too drunk, too young or unaware that hot surfaces and fire both burn).
The informal class underneath the big pin oak tree is FREE. I’m supplying my own paints and masonite for your enjoyment and bewilderment, and you get to keep your painting forever.
I’m broke as broke can be, but it’s worth giving people lessons and materials, because watching curious noobs go at the hot wax is entertaining and gorgeous.
I’ll also have ten curated encaustic paintings for sale in the gallery. These paintings are very affordable, and they’re also weird, mostly because encaustic painting is endlessly weird. You should see what it did today. It was crazy.
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I think the reasons why my encaustic paintings are included in a gallery that specializes in the typically “untrained” genre of Outsider art is because of how I paint with hot wax, what I paint, and the strange pigments I use when I make encaustic paint.
Although I took an encaustic painting course at a craft school in the middle of the Appalachia mountains a couple years back, no one told me that trying to control melted wax, which is pretty much impossible, was a good idea.
I’m OCD, and I figured the hot wax would do what I wanted it to do. It didn’t.
At first, the burning-hot wax went all over the place; mostly on my hands and my glasses and clothing and hair and the floor and one toilet seat because I also splattered my butt with hot wax (though not on purpose, that time).
But I’m also stubborn, and the wax eventually became easier to kind of control. It will never submit, and I’ll probably never stop trying to control it. In many ways, encaustic painting behaves the same way as crazy love.
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On that note, the Outsiders Art fundraiser is for a good cause. I generally avoid good causes unless they actually make sense and improvements in life.
Student U is a non-profit, non-traditional school that makes no sense at all in theory - getting a bunch of academics, amateurs and other natural-born teachers together in order to fill in the gaps that Durham’s public schools haven’t been able to fill.
That sounds impossible, but Student U is stubborn too, and it does make actual sense in practice. They’ve made seriously impressive improvements in the lives of the kids and teenagers of Durham’s public schools over the last five years. I’m betting the teachers experience similar improvements in their professional and personal lives.
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Durham public schools have a bad reputation; sometimes deserved, sometimes unfair. Durham is a bizarre, beautiful and sometimes broken Southern city that has a lot of money, a lot of poverty, and a lot of different folks with kids.
Some kids go to private schools, some go to art schools. Some go to science and math schools and some go to home schools. But most of the kids in Durham go to public schools. Especially now.
I’m always hesitant to criticize public schools because I’m the daughter of a public school teacher, I attended public schools, and teaching - anyone, anything - is a rewarding and difficult endeavor.
Sometimes people become public school teachers because they like the freedom of summer as much as their students. Some people are natural-born teachers. Sometimes people become public school teachers because other income options are limited. Sometimes people switch careers.
And sometimes, like in May of 2001, our country’s government comes up with an idea that sounds great in theory. But theory doesn’t always translate well into practice, even with compassionate intentions. Sometimes, good theories that become nationally mandated rules end up with complicated and terrifying results.
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Sometimes we forget that our country is made up of many states, cities and counties with different kinds of socioeconomic systems. Sometimes it’s just easier to apply the same rules to everyone everywhere, because it takes more time, thought, money and work to remember that some places have a lot of money, and many places have no money at all.
Sometimes, we forget that art, music, history and language are vital and life-changing disciplines for many children and teenagers who need to become awesome grown-ups. We need them to do that, and they need us to help them do that.
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Because I’m an artist, I have to believe that non-profits like Student U serve to remind us all that having the chance to learn many things, rather than fewer things, makes people smarter, more interesting, more successful, and awesome at whatever they do.
If those aren’t enough reasons to just come and check out to this good cause, then a lot of really important things got left behind, stuck in May of 2001.
And for the people who just dig the weirdness of Durham, there will be good food, good beer, wine, live music, live painting, and a lot of really weird, awesome, inspiring art made by crazy people like me, because no one told us not to, because we’re impossible to control.
Ideas come when you’re not trying to come up with one. My work schedule (I work at an adult store in town; you can get an idea of what that’s like, by request, on this twitter feed) has been busier than usual, so I usually end up painting during the day and selling sex toys by night. Sometimes it’s vice versa, but every day is the typical artist-job splitting of two different indoor spaces. Porn shack and painting studio, in my case.
Both are small and colorful; inspiring and lonesome. There is more focus in the studio; there is more social engagement at work. When things are slow-going, I try to crank out concepts or sketches in notebooks and countless slips of paper. Most days, the ideas don’t flesh out.
Today, they did. I was standing behind the counter at the porn shack, listening to a round-table discussion about the Battle of Waterloo between a coworker and a couple of our regular customers. I looked up, saw the same view I’ve seen a thousand times, and jumped for my big sketchbook. Even though I only finished three preliminary sketches, I feel the solidity of this idea, and can see the final work. It’s the best idea I’ve had since yesterday.
Like almost all artists, our home has no magical money tree. When we go on adventures, they must be cheap and span a day’s time, or else we have to beg friends to care for our beasts (1.5 cats, 2 dogs). Yesterday, Matt and I drove up to the foothills and spent four and a half hours floating down the Dan River on truck inner tubes with a cooler of food and drink.
The water was a little too cold, but the light was incredible. At a particularly low point on the river, we waded through the water looking for flat stones to skip. It was quiet, peaceful and the sunlight traveled through the translucent olive water, bounced off the river stones and turned into color palettes behind my eyes.
From the banks to the sky: Brown, beige, light green, white, yellow-green, green-blue, gold highlights on the canopied tree tops, cream clouds and a gray-blue sky. As soon as I got my hands on Prismacolor art stix, I tried to recreate each color and its low- and highlights. I sketched out the composition I remembered most strongly, and it happened. The idea was solid, the concept fell under an umbrella that has fascinated me since I began learning about color, and I can see the finished painting.
There are also the ideas that smack right into you, and you have no idea how to process them unless you’re a master draftsperson or conceptual thinker. Matt and I were floating on black tubes connected by six feet of thick, black nylon rope. The sun made his skin white as a tungsten bulb. He said kind things I will always remember. And I would love to capture even just the essence of this moment, but I don’t know how or where to start.
The lazy optimist in my brain chalks this up to keeping that instant inside my heart, and the obsessive artist part knows it’s best to focus on the ideas I can turn into concepts and, hopefully, good work.
The two concepts I’ve started fleshing out are day and night, just like my life these days.
After painting so many ancient animals, it’s nice to have some new ideas. There is nothing that can keep you away from the studio when you’ve got a burning muse in your brain. Back to it.
In the summer of 2008, I took an intensive two-week encaustic painting course at Penland School of Crafts in Mitchell County, North Carolina. A few months earlier, I’d seen three small encaustic pieces by the artist Kate Kretz, and was blown away by how well she mastered a medium known for its unrestrained qualities.
Encaustic painting is incredibly difficult to control; painting with it objectively is like trying to sculpt water with a blowtorch.
The medium is a mixture of dry pigment, beeswax and damar crystals. In order to work with it, you must use a heated surface (most commonly a pancake griddle) to melt the paint, and you must work in a well-ventilated area. Once the melted wax leaves the griddle, it immediately starts to solidify, so each mark you make is generally one single brushstroke.
Because encaustic paint is prone to cracking and chipping when applied in thin layers, you have to work on a hard surface. Masonite, clayboard, wood, cradled panels and reinforced canvases are the most common surfaces used.
Aside from its weird and endless possibilities, what makes encaustic unique is fusing. In order to ensure that each paint stroke will bond to both the surface and subsequent layers, you have to heat the wax again. This is the fusing process. Without proper fusing, the wax is unstable.
Any number of fusing tools can be used: Hairdryers, heat guns, irons, woodburning tools, quilting irons and propane or butane torches, etc. I prefer fire.
During the course at Penland, most of the other artists were taking advantage of encaustic’s inevitable scattering and splattering to create charming abstract pieces. A quick image search will show you that most encaustic artists and crafters tend to prefer abstract over objective works.
I’m still a relatively new artist; after my first BA and a previous 15-year career in media, I’ve spent the last three years completing my Fine Arts degree. Most of my work has been obsessively controlled, and I’ve just recently started loosening up my drawing and painting techniques.
My loco OCD tendencies are what attract me to working with encaustic. Trying to paint tightly within a medium that is literally impossible to control is a huge challenge when you’re fusing with a fire torch. Every time I manage to fuse something with just the right amount of heat, the reward is awesome and the results look beautiful.
(Also, my attempts at abstract work have proved that I still have much to learn.)
At Penland, we were also taught how to make encaustic paint. As I’ve improved my paint-making techniques (my original flickr tutorial eventually got picked up on About.com :), I’ve also started using pure local beeswax, experimenting with different types of natural pigments and making my own cradled panels.
Currently, I’m working on a series of 90 small encaustic paintings that will eventually be for sale through Etsy, Bixbe and local craft markets. These encaustic pieces are production work, and will be terrifically affordable. I’ll also be taking commissions, so if you have any themes or motifs in mind, please feel free to contact me.
Because the prices of most encaustic supplies are ridiculously overpriced, I’ll also be selling paint, medium and cradled panels.
If you have any questions about encaustic painting, or need a few tips on how to get started, I’d be happy to help you. Just holler.
