Francisco Benitez
Featured Artist
6
Spring
FROM THE DEPTHS OF THE
PAST TO THE URGENCY OF
THE PRESENT:
ENCAUSTIC AS A MEDIUM
FOR ALL AGES
By Francisco Benitez
There is no doubt that encaustic has become one
of the hottest painting mediums to appear on the art
scene in the last twenty years. For a good part of the
twentieth century, when new mediums, materials,
and pigments were appearing on the market—
such as acrylic, a plethora of new pigments and
mediums, and new supports--encaustic painting
was resigned to a somewhat marginal status.
Despite interest in the medium by certain American
and European painters working in isolation, such as
David Aronson, who were active in the 1930’s and
1940’s, encaustic did not hit stardom until Jasper
Johns began to use it for many of his “Target”
and “Flag” series
paintings in
the 1950’s and
Jasper Johns
1960’s. Johns
himself admitted
that he used
encaustic in a very
basic and simple
way, but even he
did not realize the
floodgates he was
about to open.
How encaustic had humble beginnings in
Ancient Greece as a paint for seafaring ships, to
advance to the status of being one of the most
highly-prized painting media in the golden age of
the late Classical and Hellenistic periods, to then
slowly fade away from artistic practice in the late
medieval period, only to be reborn out the ashes in
the twentieth century, is a compelling tale.
Encaustic, although not the oldest medium
in history—that prize goes to fresco painting— is a
member of a small elite of primal painting media
from the dawn of civilization. Although a written
history can be traced to the Greeks, we know that
beeswax has been a part of us as long as we have
been around. It is known that some form of encaustic
was used in
Minoan Fresco, National
Archaeological Museum, Athens,
c1500 BC
Ancient Egypt,
and it is not
impossible that in
fact the Egyptians
may have given
the knowledge
to the Greeks.
In any case,
our best written
Francisco Benitez, Lucrezia, 30”X30”
record of the history of ancient painting is Pliny, a
Roman scholar and encyclopedist from the first
century AD, who wrote the Natural History. In Book
35, Pliny explains, although in less than scientific
fashion, the beginnings and development of Greek
and Roman painting.
Whether the Egyptians gave the knowledge
to the Greeks, or they developed it on their own, one
thing is certain, the Greeks saw the use of applying
beeswax mixed with pitch to the wood of ships.
Wax is an extremely resistant material, especially
to the ravages of humidity and microbes. That is a
good reason why so many of the Fayum portraits
are in splendid condition. With pigment, a resin,
and beeswax, artists began decorating ships with
vivid colors and frightening attributes such as the
gigantic eyes we recognize in triremes, which were
meant to instill fear in the enemy.
This form of painting seemed to be very
durable, and before long we see it being incorporated
into the greater Greek tradition of wall and
panel painting. One of the first artists mentioned by
Pliny to use encaustic was Polygnotos (flourished
around 475-450 BC), who was an artist who was
crucial at making the break with the hieratic and
schematic Archaic style, and pointing the way for a
more optical and scientific approach to visualizing
nature. There is a striking parallel with oil painting
nearly 2,000 years later--as it became the painting
medium par excellence in the Renaissance and
Baroque because of an overwhelming impulse
to represent nature and optical reality. Encaustic,
because of its inherent “optical” qualities, was seen
as a better medium to represent the complexity
of the human form and nature than the flatter,
water-based media such as tempera and fresco.
Polygnotos was still an artist who was a product of
his period, and although he moved painting in the
direction of this new “opticality”—his major contributions
were the development of complex draperies,
facial expressions, and psychology—if one were to
see his work today, it would remind one of Greek
www.EAINM.com