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deadly beauty IN THE MOST RECENT series 'Scratching the Surface' by Auckland-based artist, Amy Melchior a historically hazardous art form is explored under the discovery of new customs. "While in Paris I fell in love with all these amazing colours that are now illegal because they were made from arsenic and were very toxic. I started looking into the movement that had brought beauty into the homes of everyday people, as well as the wealthy, from the late 1800s, which included very beautiful wallpapers and finishings that were made en masse but were extremely toxic. The pigments can be highly corrosive to the lungs, but I've now found a way to get those colours back by mixing them with wax." For the past five years a generous beekeeper uncle has supplied the free bi-product to stock Amy's collection of encaustic paintings. "Wax is a fascinating medium, the smell and the sensual luminosity – the way it creates a great depth and sculptural texture through layers. Images appear and disappear as if the wax has its own agenda. In these works I have also been playing with gouging and scraping into the wax, uncovering or guiding you into what has gone on the surface before." Encaustic painting is a process of applying molten wax colours to a surface for the creation of images, which started over two millennia ago. There are several formulae and a number of application techniques discovered from the creation of the original Roman Egyptian wax portraits. The hot wax method is how we might think of encaustic in its truest sense; that is in using heat as the solvent for beeswax-based pigmented wax paints. The first documented examples of encaustic painting date back to 8th Century B.C Egypt, where it was used to decorate sarcophagi and to depict a realistic image of the entombed on a kind of face plate. The ancient Greeks were known to have used this process too, but for very different purposes. The hulls of their boats, where cracks had appeared, were filled and thereby waterproofed by an application of encaustic materials. The prows of these boats were also adorned with encaustic coated figureheads. During the 20th Century, artists, most notably Jasper Johns, have used encaustic painting techniques to give us many a modern masterpiece. Forms from ocean and land create starting points for Amy's strikingly beautiful compositions. The ancient process of encaustic painting allows for layering of vivid colour. There is an organic quality captured through this traditional process of making. Amy describes how each layer is painted on and warmed with a heat gun, making the surface liquid, so she can "...bring images through from the layers beneath." The effect is luminous and the natural scent of beeswax is a feature of the work – even attracting bees! Amy first discovered the technique of encaustic painting at Elam's Summer School during 2003/04. Instantly, she was spellbound by the possibilities that the process offered. "Since I was in high school my mum and I have done summer schools together. I had painted with oils and tried to add wax but it never worked – it would always fall off the canvas. Mum found a woman who was running a course on encaustics and I haven't looked back." 108 | www.hermagazine.co.nz