Can You Paint With Molten Wax? It Outlasts Almost Everything Else

Beeswax is solid at room temperature and liquid at around sixty five degrees, so the paint must be kept hot while being worked and sets the instant it is applied, which forces a completely different way of painting from any drying medium. Pigment is ground into the molten wax, usually with a resin added to raise the melting point and harden the surface. The paint is applied with a brush or a metal tool and can be reheated after application to fuse it into the layer beneath and to smooth it, which is what the word for the technique refers to. Layers can be built up thickly and can be scraped back and polished.

The durability comes from what wax does not do:

• •It does not dry, since nothing evaporates and nothing oxidises
• •So it never becomes brittle with age, unlike drying oils
• •It does not yellow, which oil paint does noticeably
• •It is impermeable to water and resists humidity changes
• •It is chemically stable and unattractive to most organisms
• •The pigment is protected from the air by the wax around it

The advantages are paid for in awkwardness, which explains why the medium never dominated. The paint must be kept molten throughout, which means a heated palette and heated tools and a constant risk of the paint chilling on the brush. Setting on contact makes blending difficult and gives no opportunity to work into a wet surface over hours as oil allows. Reheating to fuse layers risks disturbing what is underneath. The finished work softens in heat, so it cannot be left in direct sun or in a hot vehicle, and it can be damaged by the pressure of packing materials. Fumes from overheated wax and resin require ventilation.

The surviving ancient examples come overwhelmingly from one place and one set of circumstances, which is worth knowing when the medium's durability is discussed. Panels painted in Roman Egypt between roughly the first and third centuries were attached to wrapped bodies at burial, and the dry conditions of the desert preserved them along with the linen and the bodies themselves. Several hundred survive, and their colours remain strong where contemporary work in other media has vanished entirely. That is partly the medium and substantially the burial conditions, so the survival rate says less about wax than it first appears, though examination of the panels confirms the paint itself is in excellent condition.

The technique was widely used in the ancient Mediterranean, described by Pliny, and applied to panels, to ship decoration and to the colouring of sculpture. It was largely displaced by tempera and then by oil, which were easier to use, and survived mainly in icon painting. Interest revived in the eighteenth century when ancient examples were rediscovered, and several artists attempted reconstructions from the written descriptions, with mixed success. The decisive modern revival came with Jasper Johns from the mid 1950s, whose flag and target paintings exploit the medium's thick, translucent, visibly layered surface, and electrically heated equipment has since made the technique far more practical than it was.

Pigment in molten beeswax sets on contact and can be reheated to fuse layers, which is what gives the technique its name. Because nothing evaporates or oxidises, the paint never becomes brittle and never yellows, so ancient examples survive in remarkable condition. The cost is a medium that must be kept hot, cannot be blended slowly and softens in heat. Jasper Johns revived it from the mid 1950s.