A practice that I have been carrying out for a few months now is encaustics painting. I started it after a field project and tried to embody it in my subject work as well. I love the texture, transparency and boldness that the wax offers in contrast to the flat photograph surface.
I made a selection of photographs that I took recently and some old vintage black & white ones that I have found in my family albums. I mounted them on boards so that I have a flat solid surface to work on. I took my palette knife and splashed wax over my photographs to transform them into something new to the eye. The effect was that part of the image was “erased” and substituted with colour making it more abstract, even obscured. In some cases it didn’t work so well because the result was too complicated and “busy” while in others the effect was amazing. Finally I decided to work less spontaneously and tried to give an ageing effect to my photos but with a modern way. I used a palette alternately sober and vivid like Fischer’s and layered images to distort time. The past and the present co-exist in the same cosmic order causing confusion. Like memory fades out and we can not recall every detail so our mind makes up a new story to fill the gap.
Michalis Theodosiou 