Photo-Encaustic: Introduction
For example: You print an image on matte paper, and the photo is subsequently brushed with or is dipped in a pool of melted encaustic medium. Much like a traditional encaustic painting, you can then add color, incise or cut lines in the wax for filling with colored paint or add materials to create a collage. Encaustic medium can also make a photo, the paper it’s printed on, translucent. And if you sandwich two identical photos treated with medium, the combination can have added depth, density and luminosity—it pops. This combination is then back rather than front lit.
The photos in this gallery are such sandwiched images. In contrast, the photos in the next gallery are glued to a board to be painted/saturated with wax and subsequently manipulated. You can also use other techniques to transfer a photo to a medium.
An excellent resource for materials, including safety information, is R&F Paints at http://www.rfpaints.com.
A shot of encaustic medium on paper. It shows how it looks after dipping.
This treated photo has a wide border (area in white) with an off-white mat in front. The shot was taken in natural room light. Since the light level was pretty low, the off-white mat actually looks brown. But the image and white border still appear brightly lit because of the backlight.
This is a sandwich of two photos—a B&W photo in the front and an identical photo, in color, in the back. Without backlight, it looks like a B&W photo (image left). But when you add the light, the color shows through (image right). When placed in a location with changing light, the image will transform from B&W- to color-back to B&W as the light fades out.
A way to hang the photos so they’re hit by backlight. Another tool is the posterhanger system (posterhanger.com). It’s particularly effective if your work is hung from the ceiling in, for instance a gallery show.
An example of how two sandwiched and backlit photos appear in a display. It's a panorama of one of the ruins of a crematorium at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.