One day in 1996 a man phoned up and offered to register
www . encaustic . com for me for £ 500 ; I didn ’ t buy it from him , but I did take his advice and registered it at a normal cost of just £ 30 . Probably thousands of hours went into evolving that set of pages , texts , images and videos on the ensuing website , and many more than thousands of people have been helped in one way or another by its existence .
I began my encaustic journey in 1986 , after meeting a man named Jean Marie Giraud who was creating images in wax and oil pastels in the UK – he was from Canada . My wife bought one of his smaller pieces and I was catalyzed by that image into an unexpected exploration of the creative molten potentials and painting possibilities of wax colours . I got ill for a week just after beginning and had fluid lucid dreams of mingling vibrant hues and powerful creative alchemy . Ten weeks later , with no past painting experience I tentatively put up some images on the wall of a hall behind St . David ’ s Cathedral in Wales . I was a wood turner and we had the hall space booked for an artisan craft exhibition . I sold encaustic paintings to a value equivalent to five weeks of my normal wage ; my outlook on life changed then .
I won ’ t bore you with the details of my complex pathway to this moment where I sit tapping a keyboard , save to say that the evolution of the Internet has been as influential to my journey as the alchemic medium of encaustic itself . My vision and mission became clear ; share the success and potentials of encaustic approaches around the world . And that ’ s what happened . I am happy about that . But it has created a number of consequences and questions , one of which asks what is actually embraced within the term encaustic .
My simple beginnings used an iron to melt beautiful wax block colours onto a slick card stock . The lifting-off of the iron produces a very detailed organic effect , one that suits coral or foliage representation perfectly . If I could do these cards so easily and quickly then I believed that anyone else could do so too .