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US Artist Uses Ancient Greek Method to Create Paintings

nassikasGeorgia Chafee Nassikas, a US-based artist with a degree in design, is a passionate organic gardener, an artist and mother of four children, whose husband’s ancestry is Greek.

In her studio she makes paintings with a method called encaustic. She combines and heats beeswax, natural color pigment and fir-tree resin, called dammar, to create an enduring product. Encaustic is “a Greek word that means to burn in,” Nassikas said to VOA. “Every layer of wax and pigment and dammar that goes on the surface needs to be fused with heat, so that one layer adheres to the layer below.”

Nassikas harvests the beeswax from several hives she keeps in her garden. In her airy and spacious studio in a corner of the garden, she uses the natural warmth of the sun to melt the honeycombs into a rich, golden patty of wax. She then mixes that with dammar — which she has ground into a fine powder — and vibrant, Earth-sourced color pigments that she gets from around the world.

“And that’s the trio of ingredients that has made this, since the ancient Greeks, the Egyptians, [an] enduring form of art,” she said.

She paints using a blowtorch and other heat-generating tools to seal in the layers. Sometimes she grinds charcoal and adds a bit of the fine powder to her images, or she might add a little gold leaf, for contrast.

The result is artwork with soft, muted colors usually sourced and inspired by nature. Nassikas calls nature “a constant source of beauty, and that is the single most important ingredient in my work.”

The artist often presents her subjects, like her beehives, in geometric patterns and forms. “So often I look at a landscape and deconstruct it to its most elemental forms, and sometimes they look very architectural; sometimes they look very abstract,” she said.
(Source: VOA)

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