FAQ

Ever since I was about 5, I've had dreams about tornadoes. I blame this on two things:
1) Living in Kansas from age 3 or 4 to about age 7. We experienced lots of tornado warnings
but were never in any actual tornadoes. I remember my parents waking me up in the middle of the night
and carrying me down to the basement where we'd huddle for a while, waiting for the storm to pass.
2) The Wizard of Oz. I saw it when I was about 5 and the tornado part really
bothered me. One of my earliest tornado dreams was at about that time. I dreamed that there
was a tornado outside my window waiting for me. I saw the movie a few years ago and I was
struck by how similar it was to my dream.

Since then I've been fascinated by tornadoes and I always watch those shows about storm chasers
and I love to watch Storm Stories on the Weather Channel. I even did the storm spotter training
through the National Weather Service a couple of years ago. OK, maybe fascinated isn't the word. Obsessed?

I'd love to go chase a tornado. I want to see one but from a very safe distance. I'd love to go driving
around with some storm chasers. Not some bozo (like me) who's taken one class, but someone with mobile
doppler radar, personal friends at the Weather Service, and has those geeky antennas all over their vehicle...
Someone who knows how to maneuver to get in the best possible spot for viewing but not be in the path of the tornado.

Before I started grad school, I was floundering around, trying to find something to say, something
to paint about. I started thinking about tornadoes and did a couple of paintings that got good feedback.
So I've been painting tornadoes (or related imagery) ever since.

Every now and then I'll come across tornado imagery in movies, commercials, and literature. One of my first pieces
in grad school was influenced by a passage in Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut:

"I looked up at the sky where the bird had been. An enormous worm with a violet mouth was directly overhead.
It buzzed like bees. It swayed. With obscene peristalsis, it ingested air."

And near the end of grad school, I found this in Wind, Sand, and Stars by Antoine De Saint Exupery:
"Straight ahead of him were the tails of tornadoes rising minute by minute gradually higher, rising
as a wall is built; and then the night came down upon these preliminaries and swallowed them up;
and when, an hour later, he slipped under the clouds, he came out into a fantastic kingdom.
Great black waterspouts had reared themselves seemingly in the immobility of temple pillars. Swollen
at their tops, they were supporting the squat and lowering arch of the tempest, but through the rifts in
the arch there fell slabs of light and the full moon sent her radiant beams between the pillars down upon
the frozen tiles of the sea."

Encaustic is a very old painting technique that involves painting with pigmented wax (usually beeswax).
The Greeks used wax to caulk and waterproof their ships as well as to decorate statues, paint murals, and
even used encaustic on some easel paintings. A large group of Greeks migrated to Egypt at around 100 BC. They brought
with them their encaustic techniques and adopted some Egyptian customs such as mummification. These Hellenistic
Egyptians created expressionistic, life-like portraits that were affixed to mummy cases. A large group of
these portraits were discovered in 1888 in the Fayum region in Egypt. You'll often hear these paintings
referred to as the Fayum portraits.

Encaustic is seen throughout art history, but was most recently made prominent by Jasper Johns. He used
encaustic in the 1940s and 50s. Some of his very famous paintings such as the flags, targets, and numbers
were created with encaustic and collage.

I melt beeswax and then mix it with damar resin crystals, which is a natural resin from the damar tree (kind of like amber).
The damar melts at a higher temperature, so it raises the melting point of the wax and makes the wax a little harder
and more archival. I then will sometimes add oil paint to tint the wax. You can also buy encaustic paint that is already colored.
The advantage of buying paint is that it's brighter and more opaque. When you mix your own, sometimes it can be dull and fairly
transparent. It just depends on what affect you're going for. When the encaustic paint is melted (molten), I brush it on the surface
in fairly thin layers. I fuse each layer to the surface with a heat gun. I will often scratch into or scrape the surface to achieve
textured effects. You can see a description of my process here.

I saw some other grad students using wax, and like the bees that wandered in the open windows, lured by the unmistakable
scent of their burning homeland, I too was intrigued. I liked the tactile quality and the play of opacity and transparency
that you can get with encaustic. You'll see multiple layers but sometimes you can't tell what's on top and what's underneath.
Someone (I think it was Joanne Mattera, the encaustic queen) said that looking at an encaustic painting is like looking INTO
a painting. You can embed objects and collage materials in the wax, scrape away, paint on top... the possibilities are endless.