History of R&F Handmade Paints
Richard Fumes
Portfolio
R&F Paints
6
DEVELOPING A PAINT LINE
[The history of R&F can be traced
back to the 1940s when Torch Art
Supplies, a small, but very unique
specialty art store in New York
City, hired a Brooklyn chemical
company to develop the first
commercial encaustic paint.
Until then, the only source for
encaustic was whatever version
artists made in their studios.
These were hand mixed and
often included solvents. The
Torch paint was machine mixed
and much safer because it was
made without solvents. [2] Unfortunately,
the encaustic market
at that time was very small, and
Torch eventually stopped making
the paint in the mid-1960s.
My own first experience as a
painter in encaustic was with the
Torch paints in 1981. By then
only about five of the original
colors remained. Any other
colors I had to make myself.
Yet, I was far from the only one
working in the medium at that
time. Although encaustic was
still pretty obscure to the general
public, it was catching on with the
art community. That was enough
to make Torch’s consider making
the paint again.
Torch’s original owners had died,
and along with them the technical
knowledge of how to manufacture
it, but a great interest in
materials lured me into volunteering
to try. The new owners gave
me bags of pigment and resin
and wax to take to my studio
with the objective of somehow
turning those ingredients into
paint. As you can imagine, my
first attempts at simply stirring
the pigment into the molten wax
were not very promising.
It took about a year to develop a
system of high speed mixing with
simple machinery. The outcome
was a “commercial product,” but
it was far cry from the carefully
milled paint we produce today.
Summer
When Torch closed its doors
in 1987, I started R&F in a tiny
basement workroom downstairs
from my apartment. My
close collaborator in this was Carl
www.EAINM.com