Encaustic Painting

I love working in encaustics, though I don't do it very often. Encaustic paintings are made using pigments that are mixed with wax, melted, and painted onto the substrate, in this case, a piece of plywood which I specially prepared for this kind of art work. The wax lends itself to mixed media work, as it is very easy to add all kinds of materials to the wax, which holds it firmly within the compostion. The collage elements in this particular piec are made from painted lutradur, which is an non woven polyester material, whilst the paints themselves come from the US and are of a very high quality.

This particular piece is called ' Traces'. One of the themes I come back to repeatedly is that of marks and mark making. I'm fascinated by the kind of natural marks that you find in pieces of stone and other natural surfaces. I wonder whether they have meaning; this is an image inspired a stone I saw recently. We read those marks as letters; but are they really, or are they simply random marks? We'll probably never know, but that doesn't stop us from speculating, or from enjoying the painting. You can find it here in my Etsy shop, if you would like to see more detailed images. It would make an interesting talking point in a small room, or a feature amongst a collection of small to medium sized paintings. It features gentle colours and lots of interesting and varied textures and layers of imagery.