The Studio as Classroom

A big shout-out to the Smith College class that came to my studio Tuesday and today to experiment first-hand with encaustic in their Historic Methods and Materials class. Ten students participated along with instructor David Dempsey plus Sarah Belchetz-Swenson and Phoebe Weil, two other artists who teach some of the materials.

Studio set up before class arrived

I put together a Power Point presentation for them on Tuesday at the Smith College Museum and then we adjourned to my studio. I gave a brief overview of some techniques and spent a longer time showing them in more detail how the Fayum portraits were probably painted. Each of the students and instructors got to try their hand at painting with the four-color palette of red and yellow ochres, black and white. We used the newly-streamlined horn tool from R&F on the woodburning tool set-up with the regulator.

Fayum portrait set-up today. You can see at the back of the table the portrait of me that we worked on Tuesday along with the black and white photo we modeled it from.

The revamped Fayum portrait I painted for show and tell

Once they got their hands on the materials, everyone was very interested and industrious. They worked very hard at their projects but seemed to have fun at it too. None had worked with encaustic previously.

Here are some examples of student work:

This one was painted by David based on the book cover of Ancient Faces

A good time was had by all - and now on to the next thing.