While Salt Lake City sculptor Jeff Juhlin traveled the country as a construction consultant, he discovered encaustic painting. "It seduced me," he says. He was fascinated by it, so he studied the works or Diego Rivera and Jasper Johns and took workshops in San Francisco and New York.
Encaustic painting, from the Greek word "encaustikos," means "to burn in," and it is an ancient process used during the third century B.C. by the Fayum Greeks near Cairo, who used it as a means of patching boats and making wax portraits on sarcophagi before discovering its beauty as an art form.
Encaustic painting is one of the most stable mediums. "It’s a very spontaneous and loose process," Juhlin says. Beeswax is heated to about 200 degrees and infused with pigment and Damar Resin (sap from an Oriental tree). The pigmented wax is then applied with a brush or palette knife to an absorbent, rigid panel like birch plywood, Plexiglas or even wooden doors. A blow-torch or heat gun, or in Juhlin’s case, a crème brulee torch, is then used to re-heat the surface to manipulate it and fuse it to the base and each succeeding layer.
Artists can add gold leaf, photographs, paper, oils or other objects into the warm wax. "You can always rework it — carve it, scrape it or add to it — by re-heating it. There is a luminescent quality and depth of surface to encaustic painting that you don’t get with other processes," says Juhlin, "and because I am a sculptor, I like the physicality of it. I love to get my hands on it all day!"
Juhlin has taught encaustic workshops in Maui, Hawaii, at Sweetbriar College and at the Virginia Center for the Arts in Roanoke, Va. He also teaches workshops at his warehouse in Salt Lake City and he is one of the artists that will be featured in a collective encaustic show at the Kimball Art Center next year.
Try your hand at this fascinating art form by taking Juhlin’s one-day encaustic painting workshop on Saturday, Oct. 23, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (with a one-hour lunch break) at the Kimball Art Center. The cost is $190 and includes all materials. Sign up at www.kimballartcenter.org or call Education Director Jenny Diersen at 649-8882. Members of the Kimball Art Center receive a 10 percent discount and those who register 10 days early will receive an additional $5 off.