What happens when you combine hot wax and a group of young adults in recovery? A little magic.
I was surprised at how open the class was to the encaustic medium. When I was first introduced to encaustic I was a bit intimidated. The medium was practically backwards to the way I normally created my art and it took me a little while to really get going on my first piece because I was stuck in my head. These students, most of them non-artists, just grabbed a masonite canvas and hit the ground running. Maybe they had the advantage of seeing this as an ephemeral task.
I taught this class a bit differently than my normal workshop. I knew these students wouldn’t be into the history of encaustics and I wanted to make sure I presented the medium in a way that didn’t seem complicated and didn’t lose their interest. I kept the project simple, each student chose a photo (some photo copied from Juxtapoz magazine) and then painted on or around the photo as they wished. These are the results:
I think the student who painted this piece thought what he was doing was a joke or over-the-top but I find the raw emotion of this piece intriguing.
