Crying Eyes

I feel as if the recent photo-encaustic work I have been doing has opened up many new creative avenues to explore, as there are so many techniques and ways to combine photography with the encaustic arts. One of my several New Year’s resolutions (and no crazy undoable ones this year) is to make 26 encaustic pieces…that’s one every other week. Sounds doable. They don’t have to be masterpieces and, in fact, they don’t even have to be particularly good. No matter how good or bad they are I will surely learn from the doing.

David Bayles and Ted Orland, in their book Art & Fear, relate a story that imparts a crucial message. Rather than paraphrase it, I will quote directly from the book:

“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the ‘quantity’ group: fifty pounds of pots rated an A, forty pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on ‘quality’, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an A. Well came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the ‘quantity’ group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the ‘quality’ group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”

Thus, the idea for my 26 pieces was born. Of course, I could have made the number higher, but I believe one of the important aspects of New Year’s resolutions is that they have to be reasonably attainable or they rapidly fall by the wayside.

I have, for many years, enjoyed making photos of very small sections of large urban wall murals that I feel can stand on their own, usually as abstract works. I decided to make one of those images into an 11x14-inch encaustic piece.

Crying Eyes 11x14 inch encaustic panel

© Howard Grill

The printed photo was mounted to a cradled wood panel and coated with encaustic (beeswax + damar resin) medium and then enhanced with oil paints and encaustic pigments. Because the actual mural is painted on concrete (it is actually the length of a parking lot and this is perhaps a one or two foot swath of it), I applied the wax to mimic the texture of concrete. One of the nice things about encaustic is that you have some control over the degree and type of texture applied. The tears (which are present in the actual mural as well) were applied on top of the final wax coat using an encaustic stylus in order to give them a three-dimensional appearance.

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