BLOG

Please join me for a lecture/slide-show about beeswax at BMoCA on Tuesday evening. I’ll be speaking about beeswax, how it is made by the bees, its uses in contemporary art and what it means. Free and open to the public.

Wax Fetish:
Beeswax, Materialism and Encaustic Paint
Tuesday, October 20th
7:00 – 9:00 PM
Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art
1750 13th Street
Boulder, Colorado

How do bees construct wax comb so perfectly?

They use their bodies as measuring tools, sometimes holding hands, making great chains of bees.

The process is called “festooning” and it’s wonderful to see. In the picture below, you can see a small festoon has formed to measure the distance from bottom of comb to the edge of the frame.

Here it is again, close up.

I took this next picture by looking down into a hive after disturbing the measuring process by removing a frame.

The broken chain reformed immediately, taking into account the new distance between combs.

Though it’s easy to see them in action here, their way of thinking, their way of processing the information they get from festooning, is a mystery to me.

One of my favorite shapes is that of naturally drawn wax comb. It’s the edges that thrill me. They’re rounded, precise and have a beautiful way of approaching boundaries, sometimes touching edges and sometimes not, always with grace and intelligence.

Foundationless brood comb

It’s a shape I think about a lot, and one that occurs over and over again in my painting. Here it is in 2008.

“Elephant,” encaustic and ink on panel

And 2007.

“Haystack,” encaustic, colored pencil and watercolor on panel

And again…

“Mars,” encaustic on birch

Often, when people think about bee comb, hexagons come to mind (understandable so). But it’s roundness, I think, that best describes the shape of the bees.

Feral colony found in an owl house. Photo essay here.

There’s a new pastime taking shape in our household. Making beeswax soap! It’s a work in progress. We’re still tweaking the recipe, aiming for a simple beekeeper’s soap that’s nice on the skin while appealing to the bees’ gentler side.

Propolis, beeswax and honey soap

Bees are exquisitely tuned in to scent. Human body odor and the breath of humans and other mammals can trigger aggressive behavior. The scent of old stings on bee clothes and gloves can also rile ‘em up. Lemongrass is a turn on, similar chemically to a scent produced by the queen. We started using lemongrass mist around the hive about a year ago instead of smoke and they seem to find it fascinating. It calms them. Hopefully, hands washed with lemongrass soap will be calming too.

Soapmaking is fun once you get past the fear of lye. There’s something alchemical about it, watching oils and wax go from solid to liquid and back again. Beeswax, in all its forms, evokes alchemy, I think. There’s the process of its making. Sunlight to flower to nectar to bee to honey to wax. Artists who use wax in their work understand how beeswax, in particular, changes things. It adds a singular depth and a warm, lively sheen to every surface it coats. Goldenness.

A lavender soap flower

As Marge McLellan says in Sister Bee, “It’s all just so… beautiful!”

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.

Collectors want to know… Is encaustic archival? Is it durable? Will it last? The answer, if the painting is made correctly and handled gently as you’d handle any other piece of art, is a big, resounding YES! Encaustic is archival, and in most cases, will outlast paintings made with oil.

The Fayum portraits are a beautiful testament to the medium’s durability. They date from the late first century B.C. to about 300 A.D. and “are the only large body of art from that tradition to have survived.”

Depiction of a woman with a ringlet hairstyle. Royal Museum of Scotland.

Encaustic paintings survive, in part, because the wooden surfaces they’re painted on are preserved/impregnated with beeswax, rendering them resistant to moisture and mold. Also, encaustic paint doesn’t just sit on the surface it’s painted on. It’s bonded on with heat, literally melted into whatever lies beneath, making it less likely to flake off with age.

Here are three things beginning painters can do to make their work archival.

1. Choose a rigid, absorbent surface to paint on. It’s important for the wax paint to bond with its substrate. Birch and maple plywood are good choices. Paper or fabric coated wood is also an excellent choice. Traditional stretched canvas is too wobbly to hold wax paint. You need something stiff.

2. Don’t mix acrylic and encaustic paint. I know it’s tempting for acrylic painters to mess with wax… and the results might look cool in the short term, but water and oil repel each other. It’s only a matter of time before an acrylic/encaustic painting starts to flake apart like nail polish flaking off a ten year old’s fingertips.

3. An un-fused encaustic painting is kind of like sandstone, full of seperate layers that come apart under stress. Use heat to fuse each encaustic layer to the one underneath to make a painting that lasts.

William L. Coggshall and Roger A. Morse’s Beeswax: Production, Harvesting, Processing and Products is an excellent resource for artists who want to understand the science and process behind beeswax production in detail. It’s got comprehensive information about the physical properties of wax, harvesting, testing, bleaching and a thirteen page chapter on the uses of beeswax in art and industry.

Check out the two electron photomicrographs of beeswax scales on page 34. Gorgeous, eh? (The layers just slay me.)

Enjoy!

The bees are flying. I took this picture of a busy hive entrance earlier this week. There are guard bees in there somewhere… but they’re hard to see during rush hour. It’s their job to stand at the front door and make sure everyone trying to get in belongs & those who don’t stay out. How do they tell? By smell!

But what are they smelling? What makes the bees of one hive smell differently from another? Until recently I believed (as many beekeepers do) that the hive smell – the home smell – comes directly from the queen. Not so according to University of Colorado Professor, Michael Breed. He presented info at a recent BCBA meeting showing that the hive smell comes from… beeswax.

But doesn’t all beeswax smell the same? Apparently not (and this is fascinating). Beeswax is a complex substance made up of a bunch of different compounds (hydrocarbons, esters, acids & such). It’s not a static substance. The composition of beeswax – the proportion of compounds that make it up – varies from hive to hive. In other words… Each family, each colony of bees is genetically programmed to make it’s own brand of beeswax that smells differently from the wax made by other bees.

Does this mean an encaustic painting smells like home to a honeybee? I don’t know… But I love the idea of a human made art object having cultural significance to creatures of another species.