Working with Wax: An Altered Book

 

After last weeks post about a safe studio set-up for working with wax/encaustic, I thought I would show you some of the ways I’ve used wax in my work over the past few years. I also have my favourite encaustic references for you and a step-by-step look at my most recent use of wax in a book art project.

Early Work

As I mentioned last week, I am completely self-taught when it comes to wax and I haven’t really scratched the surface of what I’d like to try! Here’s a few things from around 2007 when I spent some time trying out the possibilities.

Above: Testing the effect of embedding myself in wax.

Above: This was to be part of an artists book – still a work-in-progress!

Above: testing out ways of working with wax in 3-D

If you’re interested there’s a little more of my work with wax to be seen here.

 

New Work

For “Books…Beyond Words” this year, the theme is books evolving and this has given me the chance to work on an idea I’ve had since I was doing my Masters.

“Cocoon” as a place of transformation was one of the concepts that I hoped to explore as part of my masters thesis on change and process. Time ran out on me before I got to make any “cocoon” works, despite have a number of ideas developing. “Cocoon” seems to me to work into the theme of books evolving quite nicely, and so I am working on my first altered book work, assisting it in its “evolution”.

The first part of the book to change will be the cover, which will be made from paperbark. This will be a type of return to the tree from which the paper came, in order to “evolve” via the process within the cocoon.

In my local area the Council has planted hundreds of paperbark trees (Melaleucas). There is one out the front of my place and at the end of the street is Riding Road, with its beautiful avenue of paperbarks.

I love trees with weeping foliage and the paperbark is a favourite of mine. For a few years now I’ve picked up the bark when it falls off and stored it away, thinking I would somehow incorporate it into something. This new book is my first attempt working with it.

Step-By-Step

1. I gently peeled away layers of the bark using my fingers until I have the desired thickness, selecting pieces of bark with attractive patterns and colours.

2. I laid out my pieces of bark as you would any collage. You can see my final arrangement below.

3. Once I was satisfied with the arrangement, I made a 50:50 mixture of wheat paste and acid-free PVA. I painted this onto a sheet of Japanese bookbinding tissue and then onto the back of each piece of bark, gently pressing the tissue to the bark to ensure good adhesion.

4. After a few minutes, I placed the whole thing between some sheets of cushioning paper, then boards of marine ply and left it overnight to dry completely. I didn’t add any further weights, although if you were after a very flat effect I think you could place weights very gently on the board.

5. The next day the paperbark was ready to be coated with wax. My aim with this was to stabilize the surface of the bark so it could be handled without small pieces coming away.

You can see the beeswax melting into the baking tray which is on the hot plate you saw here.  At this point, I should explain that for this project I am using beeswax only, which is different from encaustic medium. Encaustic medium is beeswax with one or more additives, most usually damar resin, but other waxes such as microcrystalline or carnuba wax may be used. The purpose of the additives is to alter the characteristics of the wax, such as melting point, brittleness vs pliability, hardness of the finished surface. I am just beginning to explore how these work, so I have stayed with the straight beeswax, with which I am most familiar.

6. Once there was enough wax in the tray, the process was very simple and as you can see, not even particularly gentle! I simply placed the sheet of paperbark into the wax. To ensure good wax coverage I used a traditional Japanese printmaking baren which was coated with alfoil.

 7. The final step is fusing the wax. Fusing is done by lightly re-melting the wax, just to the point where a sheen appears using a heat gun. This allows the different layers of wax to bond and improves the structural integrity of the surface.

This final series of photos shows how the wax looks before fusing, immediately after turning off the heat gun and 5 minutes later.

 

My Favourite Encaustic Resources

Bear in mind, these are just my own favourites. There are numerous others out there. Just take a look on Amazon or on the R&F Handmade Paints website.

1. Joanne Mattera: The Art of Encaustic Painting (Contemporary Expression in the Ancient Medium of Pigmented Wax) 2001

The original contemporary guide to encaustic painting. Includes history, a survey of artists working with encaustic, and a thorough introduction to materials. Focuses on painting primarily.

2. Lissa Rankin: Encaustic Art - The Complete guide to Creating Fine Art with Wax, 2010.

New on the market last year, this is the book I was waiting for! Its focus is fine art plus a great “how to” guide to many different techniques. There have been other “how to” books out there, but they were more project-based.

Both books 1 & 2 can be checked out via the “Search Inside” feature of Amazon. The links above will take you there. 

3. Paula Roland: Encaustic Monotypes – Painterly Prints With Heat and Wax (DVD)

For something different, this is great if you’re a visual learner, but it does only cover monotypes i.e. using your hot plate as a printing plate with encaustic paints. This was something I was interested in and before Lissa Rankin’s book came out, it was impossible to find any information on it online. The DVD definitely contains more detail on this technique specifically than Rankin’s book.

4. R&F Handmade Paints – Forum 

A great online resource which you can search, and pose all your questions to staff from R&F and others, who in my experience are both extremely knowledgeable and helpful.

A Safe, Cheap Set-up for Encaustic/Wax

 

I’ve been pretty busy in the studio lately – I have three projects on-the-go at the moment.

One of these is a book I’m planning to submit to Books…Beyond Words at East Gippsland Art Gallery later this year. I was making the cover using paperbark and encaustic medium, so I thought I’d show you how I do that.

In this post I would like to share my set-up for working with encaustic/wax. My emphasis for any art activity is always health and safety, closely followed by not spending too much money until I’m sure I want to commit to the medium.

You’ll see that the set-up I have at the moment is both safe and functional but cost me less than AU $80.

The first thing that I want to say is that when it comes to wax, I am completely self-taught. I do have a few excellent references which I will share with you later. If you’ve been following this blog for a (really) long time, you may remember that I did some work with wax as part of my masters. So I’ve been a “serious dabbler” with the medium for some years, and it has captivated me from the start. I am always on the look-out for ways that it might add to the work I am doing.

 

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The Basic Set-Up

First Considerations

1. Wax: There are a lot of different types of wax but beeswax is the primary one for art. The wax in my photo is from a beekeeper just outside Brisbane. I order online here. This wax is water-cleaned but not bleached, so if you are looking for very pure colour, you may want to buy your wax from an art store instead.
2. Next you need to melt your wax. It’s important to never use your wax containers for food again. You can use a baking tray, or saucepan, or an old tin as your container, and any sort of electric heating mechanism you can lay your hands on cheaply. I bought this old grill plate at a garage sale for $15-$20. I also have a second hand crock pot from Cash Converters, which is slow, but useful for keeping large amounts liquid for a number of hours.                          Personally, I would not use a gas camping stove for wax, because it is flammable, and I just prefer to keep away from an open flame in that situation. However, I know that others do – including the famous Jasper Johns who has been working with encaustic as long as anybody.
3. Brushes: Its best to start with cheap natural bristle brushes. You can clean brushes with paraffin wax (from normal candles) but its easier to have dedicated brushes for wax. You’ll see I use some foam brushes in the photo above. I read they were useful to achieve a smoother application than the coarse boar hair. That is true, but they don’t last long at all and next time I’ll be spending the money on more expensive soft brushes, like hake brushes. Synthetic brushes aren’t advisable due to the flammability factor.
4. Fusing: When working with wax its important to gently fuse the layers frequently.  For this you need another heat source, so the layers can combine into a single entity, rather than remaining as thin shards that can chip off easily. A heat gun on a low setting, a sun lamp (in Australia!!!?) or a creme brulee torch are some of the tools recommended. A hair dryer isn’t supposed to be hot enough, but that’s exactly what I used the first few times I tried out encaustic painting, and those pieces are still hanging together. I wouldn’t recommend it for too long though.

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Safety

There are three main aspects to safely with beeswax. They are:

1. burns – first aid
2. fire
3. inhalation of fumes

Burns

Even a small splash of wax can cause a painful burn, particularly given the wax will stick to your skin. It pays to take care and always have an oven mitt and or tongs close by so you can handle containers that may have become hot.

It’s a good idea to plan for how you would manage burns, so that everything you need is on hand. This is a link to some pointers from St John’s Ambulance.

This is what I do:

Run cool water over the burn for 10 minutes

Apply a good layer of my favourite burn cream

Cover with a sterile bandage

This is a good article by the Mayo Clinic about evaluating the seriousness of a burn so you can decide what you need to do.

Fire

Beeswax melts between 62-65 deg C (143.6-149 F) and it will ignite at 242 deg C (468 F). You can see that is a huge difference and there is really no need to heat your beeswax to anything close to the flash point. In her book on encaustic painting (reference coming) Joanne Mattera recommends an optimum working range of 165-220 deg F (74-104 deg C).

Nevertheless, its always best to be prepared, and to be aware that water will cause a wax fire to spread. Instead, an all purpose extinguisher is recommended. We have one just outside the door of our unit, but because that feels a bit far away I have bought a fire blanket which hangs beside my work table.

Fumes

The risks associated with inhaling toxic fumes from encaustic work has definitely held me back from diving straight in with the medium. Anything you read about the subject always mentions ventilation. A couple of times, in the early days, I worked with the window open but still had a bit of a headache afterwards, and this really worried me.

If you are going to work in an intensive way with wax/encaustic, I really recommend seeking advice from a suitably qualified expert in the area of safe ventilation/extraction systems. R&F Handmade Paints have a very helpful article on the subject posted here.

There are however, some simple principles which can make your work environment much safer. At this point, I don’t work extensively with the medium and I am satisfied with my work room set up for now. I will share my set-up with you, but please know that I am not an expert and cannot guarantee that this set-up is 100% safe.

There are two ways that I avoid fumes in my studio.

1. Palette Thermometer

So far, this is the only specialized piece of equipment that I have bought. It is from R&F Handmade Paints in the US, and I have to say that for the peace of mind it provides, it is worth more than double the money! I never let the grill plate go over 220 deg F and there has been a noticeable reduction in both visible and smell-able(!) fumes.

2. Physical Lay-out + Box Fan

The aim of this layout is to draw any fumes away from the grill plate and out of the studio window. To get this to happen, I -

1. place the hot plate in front of the open window
2. place the box fan facing out on the window sill directly in front of the wax (the fan was $20 from Cash Converters)
3. close the window up to the box fan (this discourages blow-back)
4. open the studio door and open the windows in the next room where the afternoon breeze comes in.

All of this works together to firstly minimize fumes by keeping the wax temperature at an optimum without being unnecessarily high, and by creating a through-draft carrying any fumes out the studio window.

There is one other thing I could do to improve this system, which is to have a board installed around the box fan to fill the open window space. This would increase the draw-out and completely stop any blow-back. I may do this in the future, if I start working more extensively with the medium.

Fumes can be an issue with lots of mediums, not just encaustic. I really hope this post helps you to be safe in the studio. If you’ve got a studio set-up aimed at dealing with fumes or other toxic materials, I’d love to hear about what you’ve done.

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Next post I’m planning to show you some photos of the book I’m making for East Gippsland, as well as those references on encaustic.

Installation - wip

At the end of August I made a short trip to Melbourne to present at a tutorial and to see my supervisor at RMIT Uni. The trip went well, and it was great to have a space to set up my installation work and get a much better feel for it.

Although I have s p a c e in my workshop, it is definitely a garage, and it does seem to suck the emotion out of work, and make it hard for me to tell whether things are working as they should. A huge white room like Marion Borgelt's studio would be great, but even a small blankish space like the one in this video would be fine.

This is the work I presented for critique (sorry it's a bit dark). Or I should say, I tried to present this work... I set the work up the day before the tut in order to try out a few different spaces and arrangements, and discuss it with my supervisor. Unfortunately the next morning when I arrived with the class and the course coordinator we discovered that a somewhat overzealous cleaner had "tidied" away the crucial shards from the floor! Ah well! It seems that what consitutes art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder....

Thankfully I took the time the day before to document the work. The photos, together with what was left of the work enabled people to give me some valuable feedback. There is a bit of tweeking to do, but generally the work went down well and I'll be able to include it in my masters.

Stuck...

Work in progress

Kozo, transfer, wax

28cm x 25cm x 2.5cm

This is a photo of the full sized version of this self portrait embedded in beeswax. Earlier incarnations can be seen in this post. I think this is finished now, although it will be presented either in a box or a box-type frame, but I need to make the other portrait that is part of the work before I can make a decision about that.

Making the second portrait will involve getting my hands into some clay and after all this time, I am really looking forward to that. I do enjoy the 2D work, but I really love getting stuck into "forming" something.

I have to admit that this portrait in wax seems to be a very accurate depiction of how I've felt this past few weeks. My health has been quite poor and my energy very low. I've had one day in the last seven where I was able to work and I managed to finish this piece which I started a more than a week earlier. I've paid for that day ever since to the extent that relatively small tasks, like bringing the washing leave me feeling shaky.

I often experience the same or similar recurring dreams. I must not be very good at taking the hints my subconscious is trying to give me. One involves needing to move house or move out of my studio at uni and having left all the packing to the last day. There is a massive amount to do and I am stuck moving in slow motion, as if the whole house is filled with treacle. It feels as if I dream this scenario over and over, all night long. In reality, I have no idea how long I actually spend dreaming, but I often wake exhausted, as if I actually have spent the whole night packing!

I find it interesting that despite the original concept for this work being quite different, I have managed to simultaneously create something so expressive of my subconscious feelings.

Fruitless

Safe
Originally uploaded by potsrme1962.

This is the last post I will be doing before I head to Melbourne for supervision tomorrow. This work has been troubling me because much as I love it, I did not think it was going to work as part of my masters work.

I had made these fragile,flimsy and translucent boxes with holes. A box is a container - to hold things, to preserve them and keep them safe. I wanted to use the boxes to express how we as humans try to hold onto things, to keep them the same, and to stop things changing. To express "anti-process" and the fruitlessness of trying to keep things the same. In a way, the boxes did this but there were too many other interpretations that could be made, and were probably more evident.

I was thinking about putting different things in the boxes, but what?Then I thought of adding locks. This clarifies the idea of holding something, containing it. But the boxes have holes! And are empty! So something has happened - whatever it was has gone! To me, the work is now about what has happened, a change in state. This seems to work.

I'm not sure if this is conceptually within the bounds of my thesis - I'll be discussing that with my supervisor, but I am a lot happier with these pieces anyway, and I plan to make more.

I'm not sure whether I will be able to post while I am in Melbourne - I may only have dial-up access which makes loading photos difficult. I will be checking out a number of exhibitions while I am down there though, and will be sure to report back as soon as I can. Thanks to everyone who has provided comments and support during the past weeks while I prepared for this trip. Your help has been greatly appreciated!

Self portraits update - more advice needed...

I want to thank all the people who took the time to leave comments or email me personally to give me some feedback on the self portraits I am working on. It was incredibly helpful and really helped me to fill in the gap that working off campus creates.

I have done a few more tests, and am posting a few more images here. One thing that came up was the idea of at least seeing some facial features in the portrait with clay. Rather than working just with layer opacity I decided to try splitting the face, as you can see on the left. I actually had a lot of fun playing with this in photoshop and trying to achieve some sense of 3-D. Of course, working with real clay and projections would look rather different. Again I would appreciate people's opinions on this. Already my husband has said it reminds him of Phantom of the Opera, which isn't an association I really want.



This is an attempt at simply using a figure and embedding that in wax. To me this lacks the emotional strength of the actual face. What do you think?
















In this piece I am exploring the use of the square in place of a figure. I think this speaks mostly about the materials and loses most of the sense of preservation or embalming associated with a human being in wax. I do love the way the fibres in the paper are visible - it looks like hair when held up to the light - and suggests some new directions to follow in the future.

Topic #40 - Heart

With my love of anatomical drawings I couldn't miss the chance to join in this weeks Artwords challenge - Heart.

I made this book page some weeks ago, the first for a book with the working title "Preserve". The concept is an exploration of how we try to hold onto life, which is actually a slippery process, changing constantly and passing us by.

We live in our memories and struggle to extend our youth but change keeps happening in spite of our efforts.

If we could only accept this and live in the moment, things would be so much easier.

The paper is Rives BFK, hand-embossed for depth with a Sheer Heaven transfer, wax and oil paint.

Self Portraits - wip

With only five weeks till I fly out to Melbourne for my first meeting with my masters supervisor in over a year and a half, I am trying to do as many tests for different artworks as I can. Working in isolation here in Brisbane means that I don't get to show my works-in-progress to anyone and get feedback. I have suddenly realised what a loss this is. I am hoping that readers of this blog might step in and give me some feedback. I would really appreciate it if you could comment or drop me a line if you have an opinion on some work that I put up here over the next little while. I am definitely open to criticism - so if you don't think something is working, please tell me. Conversely, I will obviously be thrilled if you think something works well.

I have started on a piece which I conceived of as a diptych of self portraits. One portrait will be embedded in wax and the other will be a projection onto drying clay. They are both life size head shots and the idea is to contrast the two. In the clay piece, the clay is drying, undergoing a process and together with the projection is trying to communicate transience in life. The wax piece sits in opposition to this - an attempt at preservation.

I am still deciding whether to use a naturalistic portrait or something else - the black and white transfer above, a figurative outline, or even just a circle. Each says something slightly different and I am wondering which might be most powerful. I always tend to lean towards the less specific, but something tells me the face embedded in wax is quite powerful and somewhat alarming. I will be posting some alternatives in the next day or so.

These are four photoshop mock-ups of the face with the drying clay. I think no. 4 is a lot stronger than any of the others, but I am keen for feedback on this too.