What is encaustic painting and why is it having a revival?

Encaustic painting is painting with hot, pigmented beeswax. Molten wax is brushed or poured onto a rigid surface, then each layer is fused to the last with heat, building a finish that is at once luminous, textured and surprisingly tough. It is one of the oldest painting methods we know of, and it is enjoying a quiet revival because its depth and physicality answer something many people feel screens cannot.

What exactly is encaustic painting?

Encaustic painting is made from pigment dissolved into molten beeswax, usually with a small amount of damar resin added to harden the surface and raise its melting point. The word comes from the Greek for “to burn in”, which describes the essential step: after each layer is applied, the artist passes a heat source over it so the new wax bonds to the layer beneath. Without that fusing, it is just wax sitting on a board. With it, the painting becomes a single solid mass of colour.

Because the medium cools and sets within seconds, working in encaustic is closer to sculpture than to ordinary brushwork. Artists keep the wax liquid on a heated palette and move quickly, scraping back, reheating, and layering. The result can be glassy and smooth or thick and ridged, and it often holds a faint inner glow, because light travels a short way into the translucent wax before it bounces back.

How is encaustic actually made?

The process is heat, layer, fuse, repeat. An artist melts blocks of pigmented wax on a hot palette, brushes or pours the colour onto a rigid support such as wood panel, then fuses it with a heat gun, blowtorch or iron. Rigidity matters: wax flexes and cracks on canvas, so panels are the norm. Once a layer is down and fused, the next can be added, and the painting grows in physical depth as much as in image.

That layering is where much of the appeal lives. Artists embed paper, thread, photographs or pressed materials between coats, then bury or reveal them. They incise lines into cooled wax and rub pigment into the grooves, a technique borrowed from printmaking. Each decision is partly recoverable, because wax can be scraped and reheated, and partly permanent, because what is fused is fused. The medium rewards both planning and accident.

The surface remembers everything the artist did to it, which is exactly why people find encaustic so compelling in person.

Why does it have such a long history?

Encaustic is ancient, and it has lasted because wax is remarkably stable. The Fayum mummy portraits painted in Roman Egypt nearly two thousand years ago are encaustic, and their colours remain startlingly fresh. Wax does not yellow the way some oil mediums can, it resists moisture, and once cured it is chemically inert. For most of the modern period the technique fell out of common use, largely because keeping wax molten was awkward before reliable, controllable heat sources existed.

The twentieth century brought it back into serious art. Jasper Johns reached for encaustic in the 1950s precisely because it froze each brushstroke in place, letting him build images like his flags and targets from countless fixed, visible marks. That association with a major postwar figure helped re-establish encaustic as a medium for ideas, not just craft.

Why is encaustic having a revival now?

Encaustic is reviving because its qualities run directly against the flatness of the screen. In an age when most images are smooth, backlit and infinitely reproducible, a thick, matte, tactile surface that changes with the light in the room feels genuinely different. Collectors and visitors respond to work they can almost touch, and encaustic delivers texture and depth that a photograph of it never captures, which quietly rewards seeing it in person.

Practical factors help too. Heat guns, temperature-controlled palettes and ready-made encaustic paints have made the medium far more approachable than it was a generation ago, so more artists are experimenting with it and more workshops teach it. Its slight unpredictability also suits a contemporary appetite for process-led, materially honest work, where the making is part of the meaning rather than something to hide.

Where can you see encaustic work?

You are most likely to encounter encaustic in galleries that show contemporary and modern painting rather than period work, since the revival is led by living artists. Spaces with a strong contemporary programme such as Beers Lambert Contemporary Art in London, or larger contemporary institutions like Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, are the kind of venues where surface-led, materially adventurous painting tends to appear. Galleries with a broad modern and contemporary range, such as Beaux Arts London, are also worth watching, as encaustic often sits alongside other paint-based work.

When you do find a piece, give it time and move around it. Encaustic is one of the few mediums where standing closer, and shifting your angle to the light, genuinely changes what you see. Look for the depth, the embedded layers and the soft sheen, and you will understand quickly why a two-thousand-year-old technique is finding such an enthusiastic new audience.