Yes, Virginia, There is a Real Encaustic Artist Called Dilaceratus Hacketti

For some reason there seems to have been an awful lot of Unhelpful Discussion among this site's newer devotees about whether this "Dilaceratus Hacketti" person ever actually does this thing called "encaustic art" or whether he just bitches about other people's work, in whatever media.

Some particularly Knobbish persons have even gone so far as to suggest that the phrase "encaustic artist" is not meant to refer literally to the the 3,000 year old practice of mixing oil pigments into heated beeswax, but is just a phrase that The Author finds suitable to his particular brand of Slurring, as though some sort of Lye or other chemical agent were being used to remove the layers of Cant and Dung that Marketers, Graduate Students, Anthropologists, and other Pornographers have spread atop the Art World.

Not so.

The photographs illustrating this Post were taken of an installation performed yesterday evening, of a 122cm by 215cm Untitled work of encaustic applied to birch panel. The framing is in Oak.

The painting has been hung in the client's stairwell some 3.5m up, making it the focal point of the large upstairs room. It is placed on the wall so as to be visible above the railings surrounding the stairs.

As may be imagined, working at this height on a staircase was not a simple matter of throwing in a few drywall screws, but rather a Production involving a number of Professional Ladders, and an entirely unnecessary contingent of Unprofessional Kibbitzers, offering any number of Uneducated, or, much worse, Allegedly Humorous, suggestions.

Such are the Travails of Larger Format work.

Unfortunately, proper lighting hasn't been installed yet, and capturing the depth of color of a large wax painting without catching the reflected light of the room on the polished surface is a challenge under the best of circumstances. These photos will together hopefully give some feeling for the work, and the interesting way the layers of wax and pigment capture and hold the light at different angles of sight.

As more readers of a Learned and Sophisticated Nature are welcomed into the Fold Dilaceratus, perhaps in future the modestly becoming Personal Reticence of The Artist will again be overcome, and more samples of his work displayed on This Internet.