Chardonnay/Beer/Champagne

This posting is mostly for those people on FB that were asking how this project was proceeding.
Facebook was not playing nicely with me when it came to uploading images so I have chosen to present them in this format which seems to always work.

Encaustics are intriguing to me. I used to do off hand blown glass and just love messing with hot stuff. So the idea of making a mark and then floating that mark around inside molten translucent strata gets a gold star on the refrigerator in my book. I am a rank beginner in this art form and I make no inference here that I know what I am doing. But my loving the challenge so far. So here goes...

In this first image the cradle (24 X 18) is made of birch door skin and some old growth fir for stretchers in the back. The board has been heated and then primed with beeswax and then cover with a white wax medium to give me a clean smooth surface to start. I have then inscribed the surface with a stylus to cut in the bottle silhouettes. I then used an oil paint stick to force a pigment into the recessed incised lines. This is then heated with a heat gun to trap the pigment in the wax strata.

The next image shows the colors that have been added bit by bit and layer by layer. There is a fusing process that follows each application of wax. In essences you heat each layer and addition of wax to melt it into the surface below it. I have chosen to get everything a little extra hot which causes a “water color” effect. Although I'm sure a water colorist might take offense with that comparison.

In this last image the fused glass panels were made of old broken bottles that were then laid out in a borrowed kiln into rectangles and fused together. This was a very open arrangement and it has lots of open space between the individual pieces. The bottles were loosely grouped as chardonnay wine bottles, brown and green beer bottles and champagne bottles...hence the working title, Chardonnay/Beer/Champagne.

My plan is to next wire the glass panels in place with a soft copper wire. Much like the neon tubing gets wired onto an outdoor electrical display sign. And then a simple flat or semi-flat black frame.