Reality Show

I was in the studio today scraping down an encaustic painting to the bare panel and thinking how great encaustic is to work with. There is no other medium that can be totally reversed the way encaustic can, and that's a great thing for reworking paintings that ultimately don't make the cut.

And after working with oil paint last week, I realized again how messy oil cleanup is compared to encaustic. With encaustic, I can just unplug, clean off my hands with vegetable oil and sayonara.

But of course, everything is relative.

If you've never worked with encaustic and/or only know it from looking at instruction books, you probably think it looks like this.

So neat, so clean and so totally staged. (You can tell that this was taken a long time ago because my heat gun is still aqua and the rubber tree is still alive.)

In the foreground of this fairly neat looking table are some of the lovely wax balls that scraping paintings makes.

But tthis is more the reality - wax everywhere, heat gun turned grey from wax buildup and table barely visible.

Wax drippings everywhere you look.

And the floor is basically rising around the painting area.

When I walk from the painting area to the woodworking area where the wax on my shoes picks up the sawdust, I know I'm really becoming part of the process.

But that's life in the studio.