Not Too Much!

ARRRRGGGGG!!!!!

I knew it would happen!  I knew it.

I went to the gym tonight, but when I got to the parking lot, I just sat.  I thought about the encaustic piece sitting in the studio waiting to be worked on, so I turned around and headed uptown.  The piece sat on a table looking terrific.

"Don't fuck it up," I was saying to myself silently over and over.  I knew the chances.

So I took it down and plugged in the hot plate and got the wax going.

"Small strokes.  Just a thin layer.  Delicately.  Then heat it, but not too much.  If it melts, it will ruin the transfer."

"Not too much," I knew was the problem.  So I waxed it again as best I could, and it looked like shit to me.  It was rough.  Too rough.  I needed a finer brush, and I knew it.  When I left the gym, I went to the hardware store to get an expensive natural bristle brush.  But it was too late.  They were closed.

"Not too much," I said as I pulled the torch flame across the surface of the picture.  "Too much is bad."

But what does that mean?  Too much?  What is too much?

You only know after.

I was doing fine.  Really. . . I was.  Then the wax in one area melted and puddled.  The print turned all kinds of sideways.  It was over.  It was done.

I was cursing like a veteran.  Every word I knew.

"Shit, fuck, piss, cunt, screw, shit, motherfucker, goddamn, sonofabitch, pecker."

I threw the "pecker" in there just for luck.  But there was no magic.  There was no "bringing it back."  I had fucked it up, and that was it.

I lay on my back on the long loading dock where I worked.  I lay there seeing nothing.  I just needed a little Zen.

Then my neighbor came over, the encaustic artist, the one I was looking for BEFORE I put the torch to the wax.  I had knocked on his door but I did not get an answer.  I was blaming him.

I showed him the work.

"Look!  I fucked it up" (you could have prevented this, I was thinking).

"Awww."

He held the piece at angles to the light.

"It still looks good," he said.

"Fuck you," is what I thought.  But I didn't say it.  Rather, I said, "It is ruined."

Then he took the torch and showed me what he had learned by making a thousand encaustic pieces.  I would learn, too.

"It is just practice," I said.  "We do best what we do most, no?"

And so, before I left, I did another test piece.  No reason to be defeated.  I didn't get it on the first try.  A hundred tries from now, it will work most every time.

But hold your orders.  Soon.  You can have your own very soon.