Last night my wife and I went to a demonstration of encaustic wax. Yes, that is spelled correctly. Google it…
A woman sat at a table just a few feet in front of a small audience. She used a tiny electrical iron, 16 blocks of colored wax, and small postcard size pieces of paper. We saw here smearing colors onto the iron and then from there onto the paper. She did this for maybe 5 minutes, filling up one card. Then she showed the resulting image to us.
It was hard to believe.
There seemed to be no relationship between the image we saw and the crude activity that we had seen her engage in. The picture down below is not the one she painted, but it is nevertheless a comparable example. I can’t explain it…
In fact, I have made a photo of the actual painting that was made in a matter of minutes on Sunday Feb 12, 2012, by Marita Pettersson:
Hmm. Artists’ paintbrushes have always proven too difficult for me — maybe I should try making artwork with an iron…. That’s really beautiful.
You can Google the term encaustic wax and find a shop near you that can sell you the basic equipment. I just did that for Sweden and it isn’t that expensive, maybe 70-100 USD.