In love there are many stages and as in my relationship with encaustic there are also many . I was past the infatuation stage and coming into " the understanding stage ." The passion was in the medium as I began to understand it . First I had to get to understand that wax was a binder . Now , not only does it suspend the pigment and bind it to the surface , it also has special properties . I explored them all ; I played with collage , soaking papers in wax and using photographs . This led me to the idea of sealing items in wax , to me it was like preserving time . I was preserving everything from acorns to blood to hair . There was nothing that didn ’ t get a coat of wax on it . The wax started gathering and getting thicker on the board . This is about the same time I came across some dental picks . You guessed it , I started carving , digging out crevices and making lines while scraping away the smallest detail like plaque on a nice set of pearly white teeth . Once I had these deeper lines in my work , the next step was to fill them in , so I did . I filled them in with stain , oil paints and then back to wax , once again coming back in full circle .
I hadn ' t fully realized the absolute beauty of my true love until I was working on a mural . The mural was so big that I needed to use acrylic paints , encaustic just wasn ’ t going to be stable enough work . I started painting with acrylics as if they were encaustic . It was a disastrous time in my painting relationship as I was forcing something to act in a way it ' s not meant to act . So I painted with acrylics like I knew how to and worked towards how I wanted the painting to look . Content with the outcome but not entirely in love , for it was the medium and lack of satisfaction with it , I walked back to the other side of the studio with my head hung low , for I was happy with the style of painting but not in love with the medium . Then it hit me like cupid ’ s arrow striking the obvious … encaustic is paint ! It ' s really just paint ! So I switched all of the brushes I was using for the mural and dipped them in wax . From that moment I painted with wax and it ' s called encaustic . I thought , wow , how simple love can be . Have no fear , my wife was still by my side . She no longer sat alone in the studio watching me for we had two daughters that joined her .