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Jounal Star
Lincoln, Nebraska
July 16, 2006
L. Kent Wogamott: Hot wax and cool artists at Haydon

Encaustic painting is one of the world’s oldest media, having been used to create images for 2,000 years or more. But it has just come to Lincoln — at least in its contemporary form.

Organized by local encaustic artist Margaret Berry, “Hot Wax and Cool Artists: Encaustic Art Today,” on view through July 29 at the Haydon Art Center, features the work of eight contemporary artists who are working in the ancient medium that puts color in beeswax and applies that mixture to a surface.

In Greek, encaustic means “burning in.” Used by ancient Greeks to decorate their ships and create icons and by Egyptians to do mummy portraits, encaustic has had periodic revivals. Among modern artists who have used encaustic are Jasper Johns and Diego Rivera.

The modern encaustic process is relatively simple. Pigment is added to molten beeswax and damar resin, a hardening agent. That mixture is then applied to a surface, which can either be warm, to allow for manipulation of the encaustic paint, or cold, which “freezes” the brush stroke in place. Then the surface is subjected to the “burning in” process — passing a heat source over the painting to cause a fusing and bonding of the painting.

There are as many variations on that process as there are artists working in the medium. The surface can be polished with a soft cloth, in the classic technique, giving it a sheen. But it also can be left rough and dull. There can be a single layer of paint or it can be built up in layer after layer.

Similarly, as “Hot Wax and Cool Artists” demonstrates, encaustic painting can be used with any subject matter or artistic style and can come in multiple sizes.

Among the largest of the paintings on view at Haydon are those by Chicago’s Dan Addington. The director of Gwenda Jay Gallery, where he promotes the work of other encaustic artists, Addington incorporates tar with his beeswax, giving his paintings a heavy darkness that perfectly fits their subject matter.

Mixing imagery, such as the deer’s head with full rack of antlers with a red cross on the forehead in “Everything We Look Upon” with romantic symbolism and iconography deeply layered into the wax, Addington creates powerfully charged objects that are explorations of myth, touching on classic themes of spirituality and loss. That gives works like “Angel of Ulster,” which takes a statue and gives it symbolic meaning, a haunting strength.

Hanging nearby are the tiny paintings of Amanda Crandall of New York.

Done on rounded pieces of wood a couple of inches thick, Crandall’s tiny landscapes are smooth and gorgeous, bringing to mind 19th century romantic views of waterfalls and lakes. The contrast between her small, highly realized paintings and the work that surrounds them is testimony to the variety of encaustic painting. But her work alone shows how it can be used to connect with and make commentary on previous artistic tradition.

The layering and surface texture possible with encaustic are seen most easily in “Pomegranate on Green,” a large, striking depiction of fruit by Philadelphia’s Jacqueline Cornette that has a distinctly textural surface, with pits and scrapes and smooth elements. That gives the painting a rough modernism. But the layer upon layer of wax, as many as 40 in some works, give the picture a depth and richness difficult to achieve with oil or any other thin media.

Another pair of artists demonstrate how encaustic fits into contemporary art.

Paula Roland of Santa Fe works in series and often on paper, using encaustic in monotypes and creating thin, highly textured abstract works that reflect both rich colors and a sense of calligraphy in her black-and-white pieces.

Photography, the most contemporary of media, provides the basis for the encaustic paintings of Fawn Potash, also of New York. She uses black-and-white Polaroid photography as a ground or bottom layer for some of her work, creating a mixed-media process with layers of encaustic wax placed on the photo. Drawings are inscribed into the wax and oil color rubbed into the scratches, creating a unique combination of surface and color in her often grayish, landscape-derived imagery.

Alan Soffer of Philadelphia and Howard Hersh of San Francisco each work with geometry in their encaustic paintings. Soffer’s “Circling I & II” uses that most basic of forms, revealed and hidden, in pieces that come from the abstract expressionist tradition, while Hersh’s smooth surfaces combine grids, squares and interlinking panels with floral elements.

Berry, who has, by far, the most pieces in the show, alone demonstrates the variety of imagery and technique available in encaustic painting.

Her diptych “Prairie/Fire” freezes her neo-impressionistic brushwork in place, giving a different kind of energy to the standard local landscape. A Japanese influence can be seen in paintings like “Zen Garden/Plowed Field,” that looks like an aerial view of either of the title subjects and in pieces that use separated areas containing flowers and calligraphiclike marks. And some of her pieces incorporate “real” objects — such as the twig that stretches across “Cherry Blossom/Daybreak.”

For those interested in learning the technique, Berry will be conducting a series of encaustic painting classes at Haydon this month.

But even if you don’t want to learn how to paint with wax, “Hot Wax and Cool Artists” is a show that’s well worth seeing, a rare opportunity to view work in a medium that is simultaneously very old and smartly contemporary.

Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com.