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psy•cho•pomp

noun
In Greek mythology a guide of souls to the place of the dead.
The spiritual guide of a living person’s soul.

In Jungian psychology the psychopomp is a mediator between conscious and unconscious realms personified in dreams as a wise man or woman or sometimes as a helpful animal.

The image below is called Beanstalk. It’s from a series of encaustic cyanotypes I started last year.

Beanstalk, encaustic and cyanotype on panel

I haven’t made enough of these babies to give them full due on my gallery page, but since folks sometimes email me with questions, I thought it worth answering them here.

WHAT IS CYANOTYPE?
Cyanotype, sometimes called sunprint, is a photographic process in which a printable surface, usually paper or cloth, is treated with a light-sensitive chemical, exposed to light and developed in water.

HOW DO YOU DO IT?
In a nutshell: Mix cyanotype solution and apply to paper. Expose and develop according to package instructions. Apply print to painting panel. Coat with two to three layers of encaustic medium. Continue painting at will.

IS THE PRINT ON TOP OR UNDERNEATH THE WAX?
The print, though it appears on top, is actually underneath the wax. That’s one of the cool things about encaustic. Sometimes images appear pressed under a sheet of ice. Sometimes they float. Wonderful, eh?

WHERE DO YOU GET CYANOTYPE SOLUTION?
Bostick & Sullivan has a neat little cyanotype kit that I like very much. Their site is great – lots of interesting info and links – so take the time to poke around a bit while you’re there.

IS IT ARCHIVAL?
Good question. Possibly but probably not. I’ve heard cyanotypes can fade over time though they’re not guaranteed to do so. Depends somewhat on the composition of the solution you use plus how the print is stored. They can be “revitalized” by placing them in the dark for a few days after they’ve faded a bit. I’ve been playing with cyanotype off and on over the last 10 years and have yet to see a print fade. Best to think of this as an experimental technique.

Remember to apply your cyanotype solution in a well ventilated area and protect your skin from contact.

Susan J. Thompson has a new show of encaustic paintings hanging at the K. Saari Gallery in Steamboat Springs, Colorado this month. The show is called “Cat Walking.” I’ve yet to see it in person, but the postcard looks delicious. Congratulations, Susan!

Honeybee foraging on white sweet clover in Boulder, Colorado.

It takes the nectar of two million flowers to make a pound of honey. Bees have to eat eight pounds of honey to produce a single pound of beeswax. So that’s 16 million flowers that go into each pound of beeswax.

Holy cow.

The photo above was taken in 2006, a gangbusters year for clover. Each tiny blossom counts as a separate flower.

Beeswax is a show stopper at our house. Whenever we’re watching a DVD we’ve got to stop, rewind and pause when beeswax candles come on the scene. Here are three films/TV shows where beeswax steals the show.

THE TUDORS – Season One

The ultimate beeswax show is the Showtime series The Tudors. Every interior scene in this sexed up epic about Henry the VIII’s court is lit with beeswax. According to TimesOnline “thousands of pounds were lavished on handmade double-wicked beeswax candles to provide authentic lighting for the interior spaces.” The results are stunning, and boggling… just thinking of the time & expense.

TIMELINE

The time travel movie Timeline has a single shot that just slays me. When the time travelers are crashing their way through a medieval French marketplace there’s a stall full of beeswax candles in a corner of the scene. (Blink & you miss it.) There are dozens of hanging candles there, all perfectly, perfectly golden. It’s the platonic ideal of a beekeepers market booth and what I aspire to (and, alas, fall short of) when we sell honey & candles at our local market in the fall.

THE DUCHESS

It was fun to see The Duchess win an Oscar for best costume design this year. Should it have won for art direction too? This is a film that used massive amounts of candles in a stylized way to frame the Duchess of Devonshire’s face & upper body. In reality, royal candles would have beeswax back then, but hard to say if the production used beeswax or another wax for the film (some of those candles looked whitish to me). Beautiful nonetheless.

Do you have a favorite beeswax film to add to the list? Please do! I’d love to know about it.

One of the cool things about being a beekeeper is that people know you go for stuff like this.

Our friend Judy found this gorgeous wasps’ nest in the tree by her front door in Boulder last year. She was kind enough not to poison it and let it hang outside as hair-raising entertainment all summer long. (Brave woman!) We collected it after the wasps died naturally in the fall.

My first impulse, once we got it home, was to cut it open! (I’m terribly curious to see what it looks like inside. Aren’t you?) But the wavy patterns in the paper, and the inclusion of twigs and leaves into the body of the nest are so beautifully made, I’ve yet to bring myself to take it apart.

In the BBC costume drama Wives and Daughters there’s a scene where the romantic lead, a budding naturalist, brings a wasps’ nest home to his steadfast love interest Molly. It’s a powerful image, the empty paper nest. A gray vessel; round, rattling; full of phantom stings.

UPDATE 3/4/09
These are most likely bald faced hornets, not paper wasps. Have changed title accordingly.