Product Description

With its roots in Ancient Greece, encaustic is a wax-based painting medium, characterized by luminous colour and a lush service. This handbook reveals how to master this beautiful yet demanding medium. It discusses ways to achieve vibrant colour and create surfaces that look as light as a wash or as densely textured as impasto. The author demonstrates how to produce effects from abstract to figurative to minimal, and how to use encaustic techniques in their own art. The book includes examples of artwork from leading encaustic artists such as Jasper Johns, Arthur Dove and Nancy Graves.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26959 in Books
• Published on: 2001-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

From Library Journal
According to Roman historian Pliny the Elder, encaustic was used as early as the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. It is made by melting beeswax with a small amount of resin and then adding pigment while the mixture is still molten. The artist works quickly out of the pot, for the wax begins to harden as soon as it leaves the heat source. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Jasper Johns was virtually the sole practitioner of encaustic. Today, thousands of artists have caught on to this ancient, luminous medium, yet most art lovers are still unaware of it. Mattera provides a fascinating history of the art and several excellent technical chapters on waxes, pigments, papers, brushes, etc. Studio safety takes high priority since, unlike quiet media like watercolor, this one brings with it the possibility of studio fires and wax burns. Though no book can capture the mutable incandescence of encaustic, this one provides enough inspiration and solid technical advice to kindle the interest of any artist. For a good history of the medium in America, see Gail Stavitsky's Waxing Poetic: Encaustic Art in America (Rutgers Univ., 2000).
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
Joanne Mattera is the author of several craft and art technique books and lives in New York City.

Customer Reviews

Encaustic Nowadays
As I'm a painter and want to expand my set of materials I'm using, I bought it, it is a very good book to get into Encaustic

encaustic book
The book touches the basics of encaustics and it's a great reference for artists interested in learning more about the medium.

Inspiring book
This book was unusual as an artbook. It takes me beyond the "hobby" status many art book seems to have. Proffessional and inspiring!