Essay On Encaustic Painting

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Resurgence of Encaustic

Encaustic painting goes back to 100 A.D. and traditionally used in paintings of dead pharaohs. Encaustic is the art of using beeswax and/or damar resin infused with pigments and applied to a suitable surface to create a work of art - though other recipes of encaustic grade wax has been used as well.

The use of encaustic to produce art only saw light again in the 20th century during the time when Bauhaus was established as an art academy in Weimar, Germany in 1919. The artists Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee were both fairly familiar with the use of encaustic and saw fit to bring it back into practice. This has been made possible specifically due to the invention of electrical heating plates/platforms which made encaustic painting a lot easier to learn and practice with. Like watercolour, encaustic has windows of opportunity for any artist in training and is as versatile a medium as oil and acrylic paints to create beautiful masterpieces which can adhere to many many surfaces. …show more content…

Furthermore, encaustic has still made a fairly large posse of artists nowadays making debut in contemporary art worldwide. With varying techniques from artist to artist, each piece of encaustic painting has a miraculous aura about it, especially when seen up close. There’s one of many things that tie all encaustic artist and their works together and that’s the ghostly effect it has.

That being said, the only thing that differentiate each artist from the other are their ways of manipulating encaustic and whether they make use of how versatile of a medium it really

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