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We're drawn to art

By ROBYN E. BLUMNER
Published March 13, 2005

Long before da Vinci, Rembrandt or Vermeer, there were Europe's first artists. I mean those who rendered Paleolithic paintings of horses, cows and stags on the walls of dozens of caves along the northern slopes of the Pyrenees. Imagine - even 15,000 years before the invention of black velvet, art was a part of life.

The need for aesthetics is universal. According to anthropologist Donald Brown, all human cultures through history have pursued some form of artistic endeavor. So I was following in a long line of past relations when I spent three days last week learning to do encaustic painting.

Encaustic is an ancient medium found in Greek works dating to the 5th century B.C. It is a paint made from pigment, beeswax and resin that can be painted on a stiff surface and then fused using a heat gun. The course, taught by master artist Leslie Neumann, was a primer in working in encaustics.

There were eight of us in the class at the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota - the maximum Leslie allows. In the studio, every student had a large griddle topped with about 16 small tin cans, each filled with a different color encaustic and a paint brush. We painted on small wood panels covered in gesso (although not the special gesso mixed with what is called rabbit skin glue necessary for archival work). I was one of the few amateurs in a class made up mostly of artists who had previously sold their work. We were all bowled over by the luminescent and textural qualities the wax brought to our imaginings.

As a hobby, I had been painting in oils since the sixth grade, occasionally doing a series of paintings, then setting the paints down for years - even a decade - before getting back to them. It eats time like a black hole.

But the beauty of working in encaustics is how quickly a work can gain depth. It might take 20 to 40 hours to build an oil painting to completion, and that's in addition to having to wait days between layers for the paint to dry. Using encaustics, the melted wax dries almost the instant it is set down. Then, with use of a heat gun, the medium can be manipulated again and again. The downside is its unwieldiness - the wax goes on thickly and is hard to control, lending itself far more to nonobjective painting over representational work. I'm more comfortable painting what I see, rather than what bubbles up from my imagination. Still, I plan to continue experimenting with encaustics.

As much as I enjoyed the class, the most liberating aspect of those three days was the ability to take time to develop a new skill. What a luxury!

The American workplace generally doesn't allow people to spend time exploring another side of themselves. According to the International Labor Organization, Americans get an average of two weeks of paid vacation annually, while our Western European counterparts enjoy five to six weeks a year. Norwegians work 14 weeks less on average than do Americans every year.

How is there time to steep ourselves in a new course of study or break out of our everyday? No wonder people look toward their healthy years after retirement as a period in their lives when they will finally be able to pursue outside interests. One woman in my class announced that she took up painting and golf when she retired and is now a professional artist with a large stand-alone studio. Maybe raising the retirement age for Social Security wouldn't be such a controversial proposition if Americans were given a chance to live more balanced lives during their working years.

Humans are drawn to art, both its creation and enjoyment, but few of us have time to devote to this and other avocations in the way we might wish. Pablo Picasso said, "Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life." It did for me, for three highly engaging days.

[Last modified March 13, 2005, 00:23:15]