Paintings that you can touch?
My recent foray into encaustic painting has led me down a path looking for perfection in the surface layers of the painting. The tricky thing about encaustic is that the more you work the surface with additions, the more potential for foreign bodies to get embedded in the wax. You see, encaustics very nature is to balance between a liquid and solid state, so any time you are "fusing" or heating the surface to marry the layers, you are creating a sticky wax surface to grab dust, sweater fibers, and any number of things floating around your studio. My motto is that if it bugs me and attracts my attention away from the whole, then it must go! Here is a picture of a tiny little 8x8' painting that I spent way too long on, and has a wood piece embedded in the surface, a new thing for me that I will continue in the future. The wax and the wood are literally begging you to touch them, and its ok by me, so long as you don't scrape the surface of the cool, smooth, luxurious wax. Can we normalize touching art? I think we might need to with this gorgeous medium.
Comments