Melchior, Amy
Notes 2006
Melchior first discovered the technique of encaustic painting at Elam’s Summer School 2003/04. Instantly, she was spellbound by the possibilities that this process offered. Her affinity with the age old method of combining bees wax, damar resin and pure colour pigments, that is encaustic painting, led her to being a finalist in the 2004 Goldwater Art Awards and the 2006 Waikato Contemporary New Zealand Art Awards. Melchior says that encaustic painting has become such an all consuming obsession that one and a half years ago she quit her job as a chef at a trendy inner-city delicatessen (Ponsonby, Auckland), to paint full time.
“Wax is a fascinating medium. The smell, the sensual luminosity and the way it creates depth and sculptural texture through its many layers, absolutely entrances me. 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 before.”
Amy Melchior August 2006
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.
