Miloš Beran

I started to paint at secondary school.  I began with drawing and oil pastels and continued with oil painting. I have no official artistic education. During the first several years I worked in an intuitive way only. I had no idea about theory of colours or painting techniques. Similarly like a child, I felt no need for an artistic education. I like experimenting and the kind of excitement that is connected with that approach.

Several years ago, when my interest in painting intensified and literature about painting theory and techniques became more available in our country I bought and read several books about these topics. Later I also started to use the Internet for this purpose.

Looking for possibilities to present my paintings I launched my web gallery in the summer of 1998 and it soon became a very important source of feedback for me. I met a lot of interesting people and made several friends through E-mail correspondence concerning the gallery.

I discovered encaustic painting technique at the beginning of 1998 year by accident when I was browsing on Internet. It attracted my attention and I used AltaVista searching engine to find more information. In this way I also found the Arts Encaustic site of Michael Bossom with detailed instruction of the method and other encaustic sites.  Immediately I decided to try the method myself because I felt that it corresponded to my disposition as it opens a huge space for experimenting and creating rich textures.

I went around Prague artistic tool shops asking for encaustic waxes. I was not successful. No shop assistants had ever heart about encaustic. However that day I obtained one of my magical happy omens. When I entered the last Prague artistic shop the girl told me that a woman had brought some samples of home-made encaustic waxes to the shop several minutes before me. Her father was a painter dealing with encaustic, who had died shortly before, and she decided to try to sell the remaining waxes. The coincidence is really incredible, when you realize that there have not been more than a few unknown painters dealing with  encaustic in our country (I have heard about two or three painters, but I have met none of them personally).  I visited the woman later and bought several kilograms of the encaustic waxes from her. I have not obtained any information about composition of the waxes. They were very hard with very high content of resin. I also bought some refined beeswax, painting resins (damar and rosin) and oil colours. When I obtained an old domestic iron from my mother I was able to start first encaustic experiments.

I used a small laboratory heating plate with a temperature regulator and utilised beer cans as containers for melting waxes. I used also normal cheap brushes, for water or oil colours, for painting with melted waxes, and a paper as a support. The first experiments satisfied my expectation. I used brushes in combination with the domestic iron. Apart from the encaustic waxes mentioned above I also used another method I found on the web; oil colours to colour the beeswax. Later I started to experiment with paraffins and gardening waxes.

Soon I found that paper sheets are not a proper support for larger formats because of the danger of the wax layers cracking . Since that moment I have used rigid supports only, such as hardboards or rigid pressed paperboards.