Artist Evangelizes For Encaustic

You can paint with encaustic. You can sculpt with it and layer it. You can heat it so it’s like a molasses smoothy or heat it a little more so it can flow like water. When you add pigment, the colors are vivid. It shines up so it’s translucent, and it endures. The faces on Egyptian mummies still glow with it. Still, very few major artists in the last decades have used the technique.

That’s all about to change if it’s up to Ruth Sack.

Sack is New Haven’s evangelist for encaustic, the ancient practice of mixing beeswax with resin and then adding pigments to paint and sculpt with. Her work is on view as part of the latest edition of ​“Shuffle & Shake,” at the second-floor gallery at the Arts Council on Audubon Street.

“Shuffle & Shake is aseries of exhibitions in which Arts Council staff have picked artists at random from the organization’s hundreds of members to see what comes up.

This time Sack, who is also a longtime teacher at Creative Arts Workshop, has emerged out of the random pick with other well-established local talents, including photographer Marjorie Wolfe, landscape painter Constance LaPolambara, and Fethi Meghelli, a printmaker, mixed media artist, and painter with a strong eye for social justice themes.

The other artists include Diane Ward, Sharon Morgio, and Matty Dagradi. You can catch this edition of Shuffle & Shake, a lively gathering that this time lives up to its name, through July 14; that will be followed by the next crew of surprises, which will run from July 21 to Sept. 7.

Sack said she learned about encaustic about ten years ago and has now become an enthusiastic teacher and practitioner, sometimes buying up to 50 pounds of beeswax at a shot.

Sack said she particularly likes its translucence and durability.

Perhaps the enthusiasm she displayed during a visit right before the opening of the show derived from her recently having returned from an encaustic conference in Provincetown, Ma. There an annual gathering of artists working in encaustic were exchanging ideas and demonstrations.
About 400 people were in attendance, Sack reported.

“There’s nothing an artist does that you can’t do with this material,” she said.

Though encaustic certainly isn’t as easy to use as paint from a tube or a can. After mixing and heating the wax and resin (a binding agent), color has to be added. Then, if Sack wants the encaustic goop to be like molasses so she can create objects or make layers built one on the other, she heats it to 190 degrees; if she wants the fluidity of paint, the temperature must be increased to 210 degrees, she said.

“When I spackle onto a surface, I want it thicker. When I pour it into a mold or spread on a large surface, more liquid,” she explained.

Sack conducts classes in encaustic (and other artistic approaches and methods) for adults and kids at Creative Arts Workshop as well as around town. She, however, has not reached the same level of do-it-yourselfness with the process as some of her colleagues. Many of them are members of New England Wax, and they keep their own bees, Sack said.

The Yale Center for British Arts Chief Conservator Mark Aronson, who does double-duty as the Independent’s ornithology analyst, was happy to hear of Sack’s enthusiasm.

“It is an ancient medium, it holds up very well,” he said.

As to why very few modern artists have employed the medium, he suggested: ​“It’s difficult, it smells, it’s expensive.”

Aronson also cited an artist in the building where he lives who used encaustic and started a small fire.

But to some artists, it’s worth it. Certainly Jasper Johns, the only major modern artist to use the medium, and all those Egyptian mummy makers thought so.

To check out Sack and the others in Shuffle & Shake, come by the Arts Council’s Sumner McKnight Crosby Jr. Gallery, 70 Audubon St., during regular business hours through July 14.