The Art of Encaustic Painting
Contemporary Expression in the Ancient Medium of Pigmented Wax
(Watson-Guptill, 2001)

"When I interviewed Jasper Johns in 1986, he remarked rightly of encaustic, "It's an archaic medium, and few people use it." Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he was virtually its sole practitioner, and at the time we spoke, just a handful of artists had gone beyond experimenting to create a serious body of encaustic work. Yet now, a decade and a half later, thousands of artists — impelled by the zeitgeist, the luminosity, or perhaps simply by the recent availability of good tools and materials — are exploring the possibilities of expression in pigmented wax. What a sweet irony it is that at the beginning of a new millennium, when cyber images are generated at the speed of light as pixels on a screen, a laborious medium that flourished over 2000 years ago should once again become a hot commodity.

And hot is the appropriate word here, for encaustic, from the ancient Greek enkaustikos, means "to heat" or "to burn." Heat is used at every stage of encaustic painting. The medium consists of beeswax melted with a small amount of resin; it becomes paint when pigment is added to the molten wax. What makes encaustic unique — indeed, what makes encaustic encaustic — is the application of heat between layers of brushstrokes. Heat binds each layer to the one set down before it, so while the image may consist of discrete compositional elements, structurally the entire surface is one carefully crafted mass, a whole ball of wax, if you will."

                                — From the book's introduction, "The Apian Way."

I wrote The Art of Encaustic Painting after researching what I needed to know to make my own encaustic paintings better. It's the first commercially published book on the subject in over 50 years, and the only volume currently available that offers a comprehensive presentation of encaustic: a foreward by critic Jerry Cullum; a historical overview, with Fayum portraits; a gallery of contemporary work — over 100 art images (most full page, and all in color) by dozens of artists; a technical section that includes information on materials, safety, painting preparation and painting techniques; plus advice from museum professionals, art dealers, and many of the artists who are represented in the book. There's also an interview with Jasper Johns. I wrote this book for artists, but I invite curators, dealers, collectors, students and teachers to take a look as well.

You can purchase The Art of Encaustic Painting
from amazon.com. It's also in bookstores.