Encaustic Painting

All paints need a binding agent. Early paints contained a water-based glue (size) made from the skins of animals. Later, artists developed a variety of resins, eggs and beeswax.

What is Encaustic Painting?

One of the principal artistic techniques of the ancient world, widely used in Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Byzantine art, encaustic painting uses hot beeswax as a binding medium to hold colored pigments and to facilitate their application to a surface. The liquid/paste is then applied to a surface — usually wood panels or walls. Encaustics can be used in sculpture as well as painting. The wax is employed to bind or combine materials and affix them to the sculpted form.

Encaustic Panel Painting,
Icon from St Catherine's
Monastery, Mount Sinai.
(c.550 CE).

Origin

The word 'encaustic' derives from the Greek word meaning 'burnt in'. Ancient artists applied the paint using brushes and spatulas to create the image. On completion, they applied a flaming torch to the painting's surface, to reheat the wax, causing it to meld permanently with the pigments and with (eg) the wall. Nowadays, heat lamps, heat guns or even electric irons are used to create the same effect.

Encaustic paint was widely used in Greek panel-painting, while Egyptian artists used it to create the Fayum mummy portraits. The holy image painting - developed in the monasteries of the eastern Byzantine church - also used encaustic wax paint on portable wooden panels. The greatest collection of such artworks is in the monastery of St Catherine in Sinai, founded in the 6th century by the Emperor Justinian.

Leonardo da Vinci tried and failed to employ encaustics, but other European artists, including Vincent Van Gogh and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, added wax to oil paint to facilitate the separation of clear areas of colour. In the later twentieth century, the technique of encaustic painting was revived by the American artist Jasper Johns (b.1930), the founding father of Pop Art, who used it in a number of pictures of the American Flag.

• For facts about painting types, styles and history, see: Fine Art Painting.
• For details of oil, watercolour and acrylic artists in Ireland, see: Guide to Irish Art

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