About the encaustic medium:
Encaustic is the use of beeswax and pigment as a medium. The beeswax is first melted and then applied in layers t a surface. Hear source is used to fuse the layers together into a cohesive piece.
While Goren’s encaustic art is contemporary in style, the encaustic medium is an ancient medium. The word encaustic is Latin for ‘to burn’ or ‘to fuse’ as heat source is required to fuse the beeswax layers.
Greek artists as far back as the 5th century B.C. practiced encaustic art. According to historians, encaustic had a variety of applications. Among them painting on ship hulls. Was was used to seal boasts and apparently at some point someone creatively added pigment to the wax and thus the waterproofing agent became an art form as well.
Perhaps the best known of all encaustic works are the Fayum funeral portraits. Painted in the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D. by Greek-Roman painters in Egypt. These portraits – more than 900 of them – were found by British archeologists at the end of the 19th century.
As new types of paints were developed, the encaustic medium diminished during the middle ages and with few known exceptions, was revived only at the beginning of the 20th century. With the use of electricity, it became easier to use encaustic and so began the contemporary use of encaustic art. The credit for the revival is given to American artist Jasper Johns but other known artists such as Diego Rivera used encaustics prior to Johns on both canvas and in his murals.
