by Garrison Frost

There are some people who will tell you that their art gets better the faster they do it. Kerouac used to blast out novels in a couple of days. That guy on public television used to do a whole landscape in about five minutes.

But I'm not like that. When I hurry, it's usually a mess. Which probably makes it a good thing that I am not a professional artist. I don't do it for a living, and that means I have to squeeze it in between all the other things in my life: work, commuting, family, house maintenance, exercise. So my art tends to take quite a bit of time to go from conception to completion. That's a good thing, no doubt, because when I rush, things turn out very very bad. I proved it again just recently.

In this case, it was all about the beeswax. You see, for years I had been trying to come up with some kind of substance to layer on top of these line drawings and paintings that I had been doing. I was going for some kind of blurred, milky effect and I had tried all sorts of things, including varnish and fiberglass, to get what I was looking for. After some years of experimentation, I finally realized that beeswax – not regular wax – was the stuff I was looking for. What I could do was paint or do some kind of collage on wood and then apply a thick layer of melted wax on top of that. The result was perfect. About a year-and-a-half or so, I did some trial runs with some smaller pieces and figured the whole thing out. Or so I had thought. Of course, I knew that many, many artists of superior talent had probably used this technique for a long, long time. But I long ago gave up the idea of being a vanguard in the world of art. I just want to make things that I like.

Since then, I've slowly built up a number of larger paintings, and for about six months they have been sitting in my studio waiting for me to get some time to actually apply the wax. For what seemed like a million consecutive weekends, I told myself I would make time to melt the wax and finish the pieces, only to get to Sunday night without it being done. Lots of reasons there. First, the melted beeswax is a pain. It smells and is probably some kind of toxic hazard. It was easy to risk it when only my wife and I had to breathe it in, but with a baby in the house, I realized it had to be done outside on the gas barbecue. Problem was, I didn't have a gas barbecue that worked for a long time.

So anyway, about a week ago, everything was finally in place. I was alone in the house with our daughter and I reasoned that I could probably pull everything off during one of her naps.

Once she was asleep, I ran outside and chopped up the wax, put it in a pot, and set it on the barbecue. I ran to my finished paintings, only to find them pretty dusty. In a hurry, I wiped one down, only to find that doing so had blurred a bunch of lines that I had done in not-so-waterproof ink.

Wax was melting. Baby was sleeping.

Quickly I tried to fix the painting, but further erasing and drawing only seemed to make it worse.

Wax was melting. Baby still sleeping.

Quickly running out of time, I took the painting into the house and put painter's tape around the outside to keep the melted wax in place. The tape wouldn't cut right, so I had to do it a bunch of times before I got it right. I could tell that the tape wasn't sticking very well to the board, but there wasn't a choice but to move forward. I went into the kitchen and grabbed the old cookie sheet I had planned to use under the piece when I poured the wax. This was to protect the wood on the deck outside the kitchen, which I had long ago confirmed is the only flat area with running distance of the barbecue.

Wax was melting. Baby still sleeping.

Turned out the cookie sheet wasn't large enough to hold the piece. So I just laid down some newspaper, which almost immediately started blowing around. Dropping everything I ran inside the garage, grabbed a few bricks, came back, tracked down the newspapers that were flying away and set everything up as fast as I could.

Wax was melting. Baby still sleeping.

By now the wax was just about fully melted. Fast as I could, I grabbed the pot and ran to the deck where the artwork lay. Just before pouring, I realized that the wax was full of bits of dirt and grime. I should have clean out the old camping pot before using it. Plus I should have cleaned the workshop counter before cutting up the wax on it. Oh well, no time to do everything again. I poured the wax onto the artwork and it immediately spread out over the surface and filled up the space surrounded by the tape. Melted wax is actually pretty thin, almost like water, so you really need it to start cooling fast. Problem is, I was doing this in the middle of a hot Los Angeles day, so the wax didn't melt right away. Instead, it started leaking through the parts of the painter's tape that hadn't adhered to the wood. Within seconds, there was melted wax all over the newspaper, threatening to soak through on the deck. Because it was so hot, the wax wasn't thickening at all. What little was actually on the artwork was totally dirty and settling into little puddles – exactly not what I wanted.

I tried to pick up the newspaper, but found the wax to be impossibly hot. I couldn't touch it. I had no choice but to hope for it to cool before it got all over the deck. But of course it did get all over the deck. Neither could I pick up the artwork, as the edges were completely soaked with the burning wax.

Baby still sleeping. But not for long.

I ran inside the kitchen and got some pot holders, and only then was I able to get the artwork out of there. I picked up the newspaper and stuffed it into a nearby bucket. Melted wax was all over the deck and was now, unfortunately, cooling into place. In something of a panic, I grabbed the hose and tried to spray it off, but that only made it cool faster. I went into the garage and got a scraper and removed as much wax as I could, but this was a cleaning project that was going to take a lot more time later. So I settled for just getting everything back to a normal place. The fairly wrecked art piece went back with the other five that thankfully I hadn't had time to ruin. I set the pot to cool on the concrete in the backyard. I turned the barbecue off and let it cool.

Finally, dripped with sweat, I went back inside to sit down and maybe eat something. But by now the baby was crying and my break was over.

(Aug. 28, 2006)

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