Nikos Eliadis

The Person

Nikos Eliadis is fifty-five years old. He lives in Ano Syros, the medieval Catholic quarter that sits on top of the hill above the port town of Ermoupoli, on the island of Syros in the Cyclades. He paints portraits in encaustic — hot beeswax mixed with pigment, applied to wood panels. He has been doing this for twenty-three years. Before encaustic, he painted in oil, and before oil, he drew in charcoal. But since the first time he heated wax in a tin on his kitchen stove and dragged a loaded brush across a piece of plywood, he has not gone back.

He is not famous. He has had solo shows in Athens (three), Thessaloniki (one), and a group show in London in 2014 at a small gallery in Bermondsey that no longer exists. He sells enough to continue. Not enough to be comfortable. His wife, Daphne, teaches English at a frontistirio in Ermoupoli. Between her salary and his intermittent sales, they manage. The house is paid for — he inherited it from his grandmother, who inherited it from her mother.

Biography

Nikos was born in Piraeus, the port of Athens, in 1971. His father, Giorgos, was a ship fitter at the Skaramangas shipyard. His mother, Eleftheria, worked in a pharmacy on Kolokotroni Street. He was the second of three children. His older brother, Thanasis, is an electrician in Perama. His younger sister, Maria, lives in Heraklion.

He drew constantly as a child — on newspapers, on the backs of his father's work orders, on the margins of his schoolbooks. His mother kept a box of his childhood drawings. After she died in 2018, he found it in her closet. He cannot look at the drawings without feeling a weight he cannot name, so the box stays closed on a shelf in his studio. He knows it's there. That's enough.

He studied painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts from 1990 to 1995 under Dimitris Mytaras, who was known for large figurative works with an expressionist edge. Nikos learned technical discipline from Mytaras — how to mix color, how to see tone rather than hue, how to construct a face from planes of light rather than from features. Mytaras died in 2017. Nikos does not mention him often but keeps a postcard of one of his paintings — a large, loosely brushed head in purple and orange — pinned to the wall above his wax warmer.

After graduating, he spent six years in Athens doing what most young Greek painters do: working other jobs (waiter, house painter, museum guard at the Benaki) and painting when he could. He showed in group exhibitions in Psyrri galleries. He sold a few pieces. He met Daphne at a friend's name-day party in 2001. She was from Syros and talked about the island in a way that made him want to see it.

He visited Syros in the summer of 2002. They stayed in his grandmother's empty house in Ano Syros — whitewashed walls, blue shutters, a courtyard with a lemon tree that had gone half-wild. The light on Syros is different from the light in Athens. Athens light is white, flat, bleached by pollution. Syros light is warm and directional — it comes off the sea and it carries the sea's color into the shadows. He noticed this immediately. A painter notices light the way a musician notices pitch.

They moved permanently in 2003. He set up a studio in the back room of the house — a room that had been a storeroom, with a deep window facing north and a stone floor that stays cool even in August.

The encaustic discovery came by accident. In 2003, he was visiting the National Archaeological Museum in Athens and spent an afternoon with their collection of Fayum mummy portraits. He had seen them before — every Greek art student sees them — but that afternoon he looked properly. He stood in front of a portrait of a young man with a thin mustache, painted in the second century CE, and realized he was looking at someone who had been dead for eighteen hundred years but whose face was completely, startlingly present. The wax was still glossy. The skin tones were warm. The eyes were looking at him.

He went home and began researching encaustic. He read Pliny the Elder's description of the technique in Natural History. He read about Karl Zerbe, who revived encaustic at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in the 1940s. He read about Jasper Johns, whose Flag paintings in encaustic in the 1950s brought the medium back into the conversation of contemporary art — Johns chose encaustic because the wax set fast enough that every brushstroke remained distinct, the surface recording the history of its own making. He read about contemporary encaustic painters — Joanne Mattera, whose book The Art of Encaustic Painting became his technical manual; Tony Scherman, whose large-scale encaustic portraits proved the medium could work at monumental scale.

He ordered his first batch of filtered beeswax and damar resin from a supplier in Thessaloniki. He melted it on his kitchen stove. The smell filled the house — warm, sweet, faintly medicinal. Daphne said it smelled like a church. She was right. The Orthodox churches of Syros burn beeswax candles and the smell is part of the architecture of the island — you encounter it in doorways, in narrow streets, drifting out of the Agios Nikolaos cathedral.

His first encaustic portrait was terrible. The wax cooled too fast. The colors muddied. The surface looked like something that had melted rather than something that had been painted. He scraped it off the panel and tried again. It took him a year of daily work to understand the medium — its rhythms, its refusals, its particular demands.

What he discovered was this: encaustic does not allow revision. You cannot blend on the surface the way you blend oil paint. Each stroke is a commitment. The wax cools in seconds, and once it cools, it is what it is. You can reheat it — use a heat gun, a torch, an iron — and rework it, but the reworking is a new act, not a continuation of the old one. Every mark is a separate decision. This is what he loves about it. Oil painting, he says, is a conversation. Encaustic is a series of declarations.

The Work

Nikos paints portraits. Only portraits. He has never painted a landscape, a still life, a figure without a face. "The face is where the whole problem is," he says. "If I can get the face right, the rest is just information."

His subjects are people he knows — neighbors in Ano Syros, fishermen from the harbor, the woman who runs the periptero in Ermoupoli, his wife, his daughter Ioanna (who is twenty-two and studying architecture in Thessaloniki), occasionally himself. He does not paint from photographs. He paints from life, with the subject sitting across from him in his studio, and this creates the central tension of his practice: the sitter must be patient, but the medium demands speed. The wax cools. The stroke must be made. There is a narrow window — perhaps three to five seconds after loading the brush — when the wax is fluid enough to move. After that, it seizes. You are working against the clock of thermodynamics.

His panels are Baltic birch plywood, sanded smooth and sealed with three coats of encaustic gesso — a mixture of beeswax, damar resin, and chalk. The gesso creates a ground that is itself wax, so the paint layers fuse molecularly with the surface. This is what gives encaustic its permanence: not adhesion but fusion. The paint does not sit on the panel. It becomes part of it.

His palette is limited and warm: yellow ochre, raw umber, burnt sienna, Indian red, ivory black, and titanium white, all ground into molten beeswax and damar resin at a ratio of roughly 8:1 wax to resin. The damar raises the melting point and adds hardness. Without it, the surface would be too soft — vulnerable to scratches, to fingerprints, to summer heat. With it, the surface is durable, slightly glossy, and can be buffed to a sheen with a soft cloth. He mixes his paints on a heated palette — an old electric griddle that he bought at a flea market in Ermoupoli and keeps at a steady 200 degrees Fahrenheit. The cakes of colored wax sit on the griddle in muffin tins, liquid and ready.

He works with hog-bristle brushes — stiff enough to carry the thick wax — and a cestrum, a heated metal tool that looks like a small spatula. The cestrum is for detail work: the edge of a nostril, the line where the upper lip meets the skin, the crease at the corner of an eye. He heats it with a small butane torch. The tool must be hot enough to move the wax but not so hot that it burns through to the panel. This is a judgment call — there is no thermometer for a cestrum. You learn the temperature by the sound: a faint hiss when you touch it to wax means it's right. Silence means it's too cool. A sizzle means it's too hot and you've just burned a hole in someone's cheek.

Each layer must be fused to the one beneath it. After laying down a stroke or a passage of color, Nikos passes a heat gun over the surface — quickly, from a distance of about eight inches. The surface goes glossy for a moment as the top layer melts into the one below, then matte again as it cools. This fusing is what gives encaustic its depth — light enters the translucent wax, bounces off the white ground beneath, and returns through the pigmented layers. The luminosity is not on the surface. It comes from inside. This is why the Fayum portraits still glow: the light is trapped in the wax.

A portrait takes him three to five sittings, each about two hours. Between sittings, he works on the surface alone — scraping back areas that are too thick with a razor blade, building up translucent glazes of thinned wax, fusing and re-fusing. The finished surface has a quality he describes as "warm skin over cold stone." It is smooth to the touch but not slick. It has the temperature of the room, which in his stone-walled studio is always slightly cool. Visitors who touch his paintings — he lets them, encourages it — say they feel alive, which is not a mystical claim but a thermodynamic one. Wax is a poor conductor. It holds the warmth of your finger. Oil paint does not do this. Canvas does not do this. Only wax.

The Place

Ano Syros is the oldest settlement on Syros — a medieval Catholic quarter built by the Venetians in the thirteenth century, stacked up the hillside in a dense spiral of whitewashed houses, narrow stairways, and arched passages. It sits above Ermoupoli, the island's port and administrative capital, which is the neoclassical one — grand, planned, built in the nineteenth century by refugees from the massacres of Chios and Psara. Ermoupoli is the public face of Syros. Ano Syros is the private one.

The two towns have different religions (Ermoupoli is Orthodox, Ano Syros is Catholic), different architectures (planned versus organic), and different lights. Ermoupoli faces east toward the harbor. Ano Syros faces every direction because it wraps around the top of the hill. Nikos's studio window faces north — the painter's light, steady and cool, never direct. But when he steps out of his studio into the courtyard, the afternoon sun hits the whitewashed wall opposite and fills the space with reflected warmth. The lemon tree — pruned back to sanity by Daphne — drops fruit that he never picks in time. The courtyard smells of lemon and hot stone and, when he's been working, beeswax.

The walk from his house down to the harbor takes twelve minutes on the marble-paved steps that connect Ano Syros to Ermoupoli. He makes this walk every morning to buy bread and coffee from the bakery on Plateia Miaouli, the main square. The square has a marble bandstand and palm trees and a view across the harbor to the island of Tinos. On clear days you can see Mykonos beyond it. On most days you cannot.

The island has a population of about 21,000, which makes it the most populated of the Cyclades. It has an industrial history — the Neorion shipyard in Ermoupoli was the largest in Greece in the nineteenth century — and a cultural one: the Apollo Theater, a miniature La Scala, was built in 1864. Syros is not a tourist island in the way that Santorini or Mykonos are tourist islands. Tourists come, but the island does not depend on them. It has its own economy, its own pace, its own sense of itself. Nikos chose it for this reason. "An island that needs tourists is performing. Syros is just living."

Physical Description

Medium height — about 5'10". Lean, with the angular build of someone who doesn't eat enough at lunch and walks up and down a hill several times a day. His hair is dark brown going grey, thick, worn slightly long — it curls behind his ears and he pushes it back with his wrist when his hands are waxy, which is most of the time. His face is weathered — the Cycladic sun and wind have done their work. Deep lines from nose to mouth. Brown eyes, slightly hooded. A nose that has been broken once (a fall on the marble steps of Ano Syros in 2011, carrying a panel that blocked his view).

His hands are his most distinctive feature: the fingertips are perpetually smooth, almost polished, from handling warm wax. The wax fills the whorls of his fingerprints over the course of a working day, giving his fingertips a strange, featureless quality — as if the prints have been worn away. Between the fingers, in the creases of his knuckles, there are traces of pigment that no amount of scrubbing removes: ochre in the right hand, umber in the left (he holds his darker-valued brush in his left, a habit he has never questioned).

He wears cotton trousers and a linen shirt, both stained. He has one good shirt for openings. His shoes are leather sandals in summer, work boots in winter. He wears a canvas apron when painting — not for cleanliness (the wax gets everywhere regardless) but because the apron has pockets for his cestrum and his razor blade and the small butane torch.

There is a burn scar on the inside of his left wrist — a half-moon, the size of a coin — from the first year of working in encaustic, when he knocked over a tin of molten wax. The scar is smooth and shiny, like the wax that made it. He calls it his "baptism." The medium marked him before he made anything worth keeping.

Visual Style Guide

For images of Nikos and his world:

• Palette: Warm and mineral. The yellow-white of Cycladic whitewash. The ochre and umber of his paints — earthy, not garish. The amber-gold of liquid beeswax. The grey-blue of weathered wood shutters. The deep green of the lemon tree. The warm brown of Baltic birch panels. The cool grey of stone floors and walls. Occasional accents: the cobalt blue of a Greek sky seen through a window, the red-brown of a terra cotta pot, the dull silver of a well-used cestrum. Absent: neon, chrome, anything synthetic or cold. This world is stone and wax and wood and sunlight.

• Light: North-facing studio light — steady, cool, slightly blue-white, indirect. No direct sun in the studio. In the courtyard: warm reflected light bouncing off whitewashed walls, creating the soft, diffused brightness particular to the Cyclades — intense but not harsh, because the white surfaces scatter it. On the steps and streets: directional Mediterranean sun creating strong shadows in narrow passages. Indoor scenes should have a single light source (the north window) with secondary warmth from the heated palette and the glow of molten wax.

• Texture: Wax is the primary texture — liquid, cooling, solidified. Smooth and glossy where freshly fused. Matte where cooled. Ridged where brushstrokes have been left. The wood grain of panels, visible through translucent layers. The rough stone of the studio walls and floor. The scored, wax-spattered surface of his work table. The stiff bristles of hog-hair brushes caked with dried wax. The worn marble of the Ano Syros steps, polished by centuries of feet.

• Composition: Intimate. Close to the work, close to the hands. The panels are small — most are 10 x 14 inches — so the camera should be close. Compositions should feel like being in the room, not observing from outside. The relationship between painter and sitter: two people, a small panel between them, the heated palette to one side. The geometry of the studio: the north window, the work table, the griddle with its tins of colored wax. The vertical composition of Ano Syros: narrow stairs, stacked houses, the church of San Giorgio at the top.

• Mood: Concentrated warmth. The heat of the wax, the warmth of the palette, the warm light in the courtyard — but always in the service of focused, unhurried attention. Not cozy. Not rustic. The images should feel like a place where difficult work happens at a careful pace. The dignity of a practice that has been sustained for decades without acclaim. Think Morandi's studio photographs — sparse, specific, the life stripped to its essentials. Think the quiet concentration of Vermeer's interiors — but rougher, less polished, lived-in.

• References: Morandi's studio photographs. Vermeer's interior light (the north window). The warmth of Freud's painting-room photographs. Greek documentary photography — the work of Nikos Economopoulos (Magnum) for the quality of Cycladic light and street texture. The Fayum portraits themselves — for the directness of the gaze, the warmth of the palette, the immediacy.

• What to avoid: Anything that looks like a Greek tourism poster. No sapphire-blue sea, no white-and-blue calendar image, no bougainvillea-draped doorway used as decoration. No golden hour. No romanticism of the "island artist" lifestyle. Nikos is a working painter on an island that happens to be in Greece, not a character in a Mediterranean fantasy. Also avoid: pristine, clean studio shots. The studio is orderly but marked by use — wax drippings on every surface, scorch marks on the table, the particular patina of a space where hot materials have been handled for two decades.

Relationship to Real Traditions

Encaustic painting is one of the oldest painting techniques known. Pliny the Elder describes it in Book XXXV of Natural History (77 CE), naming Pausias of Sicyon as a master of the technique in the fourth century BCE. The word comes from the Greek enkaustikos — "to burn in." The technique was used extensively in Greco-Roman Egypt for the Fayum mummy portraits (first through third centuries CE), which represent the largest surviving body of encaustic painting from antiquity. These portraits — roughly 900 survive — are housed in collections worldwide and remain the most direct evidence of how encaustic was practiced in the ancient world.

The medium largely disappeared after the third century CE as tempera and later oil painting became dominant. It was revived intermittently — there are accounts of eighteenth-century experiments — but the modern revival begins with Karl Zerbe at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in the 1940s. Zerbe taught encaustic technique to a generation of students and demonstrated that the medium could serve contemporary artistic concerns.

Jasper Johns's Flag (1954–55) is the most famous modern encaustic painting. Johns chose the medium specifically because the quick-setting wax preserved every brushstroke, creating a surface that was simultaneously image and record of process. The painting's surface is a palimpsest — newspaper collage beneath layers of wax, the dripped and built-up texture as much the subject as the flag itself. Johns's use of encaustic opened the medium to a generation of artists who valued surface, process, and material presence.

Contemporary encaustic practice includes artists like Tony Scherman (large-scale figurative encaustic), Joanne Mattera (abstract encaustic, and author of The Art of Encaustic Painting, the standard technical reference), and Lissa Rankin. The medium has experienced a significant revival since the 1990s, with dedicated organizations (International Encaustic Artists, R&F Handmade Paints) supporting practitioners. The technical demands are real: molten wax requires temperature control (melting point of beeswax is approximately 145°F / 63°C; working temperature is 200°F / 93°C), ventilation (damar resin fumes), and fire safety awareness. The tools — heated palette, heat gun, cestrum, natural-bristle brushes — have remained essentially unchanged since antiquity.

The connection between encaustic and portraiture is rooted in the Fayum tradition: the medium's translucency creates a luminosity in skin tones that oil paint achieves differently. Light enters the wax, reflects off the white ground, and returns through pigmented layers — an optical effect similar to the way light interacts with actual skin (subsurface scattering). This is why encaustic portraits have a quality of seeming lit from within. It is a physical property of the wax, not a metaphor.

Syros has a genuine artistic community, smaller than Tinos (which has a stronger sculpture tradition) but present. The Cycladic light and the island's relative lack of mass tourism make it a plausible home for a working artist. Ermoupoli's neoclassical architecture and the Apollo Theater reflect the island's nineteenth-century cultural prominence as a major Aegean port.

Key Details for Writing

• The burn scar on his left wrist — his "baptism" by the medium. Smooth and shiny, like the wax that made it.
• His fingerprints are filled with wax by the end of each working day — the featureless, polished quality of his fingertips.
• Ochre traces in his right hand, umber in his left. He has never questioned this asymmetry.
• The box of childhood drawings, closed, on a shelf in the studio. He knows it's there.
• The smell of beeswax = the smell of the church. Daphne noticed it first.
• He paints from life, never from photographs. The sitter must be patient while the wax refuses to be.
• The sound of the cestrum: hiss means right, silence means too cool, sizzle means too hot.
• The postcard of Mytaras's painting, pinned above the wax warmer.
• "Oil painting is a conversation. Encaustic is a series of declarations."
• He does not consider himself connected to the Fayum painters. He considers himself indebted to them.

Quotes (voice reference)

• "The wax doesn't wait. You have maybe four seconds. After that you're pushing cold butter."
• "I don't copy them. The Fayum painters. But I owe them everything. They proved that wax could hold a face for two thousand years. I just have to hold one for the afternoon."
• "Every brushstroke in encaustic is a decision you can't take back. Oil lets you reconsider. Wax says: you meant that, whether you meant it or not."
• "People touch the paintings and they say it feels warm. It isn't warm. It's room temperature. But wax holds your heat — it takes it from your finger and keeps it for a moment. That's what they're feeling. Themselves, reflected back."
• On painting portraits: "The face is where the whole problem is. If I can get the face right, the rest is just information."
• On Syros: "An island that needs tourists is performing. Syros is just living."
• On the smell: "Daphne said it smelled like a church. She was right. The beeswax. You melt it and the whole house becomes a cathedral."
• On his fingerprints: "By evening my fingertips are smooth. No prints. The wax fills them in. I become nobody for a few hours. Then I wash my hands and I'm myself again."

promptPrefix

"Warm encaustic painting studio on a Greek island, intimate and close, Mediterranean north-light through a deep stone window,"

promptSuffix

", warm palette of ochre and umber and amber-gold beeswax and whitewash-white, textured waxy surfaces, stone walls, the concentrated quiet of Morandi's studio photographs — unhurried, specific, a space shaped by decades of focused work with hot wax and pigment"

Portfolio

Encaustic Surface, Close

Orientation: square

Close-up photograph, the surface of an encaustic portrait on birch panel — a passage of cheekbone and eye. Translucent layers of beeswax and pigment in yellow ochre, burnt sienna, and raw umber, the white gesso ground faintly visible beneath. Ridged brushstrokes of cooled wax, some glossy where freshly fused, others matte where cooled undisturbed. The wood grain of the birch panel showing through the thinnest translucent areas. A fine line incised by a heated cestrum at the edge of the nostril. Warm directional light from the upper left, the waxy surface catching a soft sheen. Shallow depth of field. In the quality of a Fayum mummy portrait detail. No text.

The Heated Palette

Orientation: landscape

Close-up photograph, an old electric griddle on a scored wooden worktable. Six muffin tins arranged on the griddle surface, each holding a pool of molten colored wax — yellow ochre, raw umber, burnt sienna, Indian red, ivory black, titanium white. The wax is liquid, glossy, amber-tinted. Faint steam or heat shimmer visible above the griddle. Drips and spatters of dried wax coat the griddle edges and the surrounding table surface in overlapping layers. A hog-bristle brush resting across one tin, bristles stiff with cooled ochre wax. The small butane torch beside the griddle. Warm ambient light. In the quality of Morandi's studio photographs. No text.

Portrait on the Panel

Orientation: portrait

Encaustic painting on birch panel, a portrait of a middle-aged Greek woman, head and shoulders. The face built from layered strokes of warm ochre, burnt sienna, and ivory black mixed into beeswax, each stroke distinct where the wax cooled before it could blend. Skin tones luminous — light entering the translucent wax layers and reflecting off the white ground beneath. The eyes dark brown, rendered with a cestrum in fine heated lines. The background a flat field of raw umber wax, slightly uneven. The birch panel edge visible at the bottom, unpainted, showing pale wood grain. The surface slightly glossy, the quality of old beeswax. No text.

The Studio Window

Orientation: landscape

Interior photograph, a deep-set stone window in a whitewashed wall, facing north. The window frame is thick — old stone construction, the plaster rough and slightly uneven. Through the window, the whitewashed facades of Ano Syros houses stacked up the hillside, a slice of pale blue Cycladic sky above. Inside the studio, the cool grey stone floor, a wooden worktable beneath the window covered in wax spatters, a birch panel propped against the wall. A postcard of a Mytaras painting — loosely brushed head in purple and orange — pinned to the whitewash above the window frame. The light falls in a single directional shaft. No text.

Hands with Cestrum

Orientation: landscape

Close-up photograph, Nikos's hands working on a small encaustic panel. His right hand holds a heated cestrum — a small metal spatula tool, its tip touching the wax surface of a portrait at the corner of a painted eye. His left hand steadies the birch panel. The fingertips of both hands are smooth, polished, featureless — the wax has filled the fingerprint whorls. Ochre pigment visible in the creases of his right knuckles, umber in his left. The burn scar on his left inner wrist — a smooth, shiny half-moon the size of a coin. Warm, close light. Shallow depth of field, the heated griddle palette blurred behind. No text.

The Courtyard

Orientation: portrait

Exterior photograph, a small whitewashed courtyard in Ano Syros. A lemon tree with dark green leaves and three ripe yellow lemons, slightly overgrown, branches touching the opposite wall. The whitewashed walls reflecting warm afternoon sun — the diffused brightness particular to the Cyclades, intense but scattered by the white surfaces. A blue-grey wooden shutter, paint weathered and peeling. A terra cotta pot with dried earth near the doorway. Through the open studio door, the dim interior visible — the edge of the worktable, a panel on the wall, the faint amber glow of the heated griddle. The stone threshold between courtyard and studio. No text.

Fusing the Surface

Orientation: landscape

Close-up photograph, a heat gun held eight inches above the surface of an encaustic panel. The wax surface going momentarily glossy as the top layer melts — a small area of cheek and jawline turning liquid, reflective, the pigmented ochre and umber wax flowing into the layer beneath. The surrounding surface matte where already cooled. The birch panel clamped to the worktable. Nikos's left hand visible at the panel edge, steadying it. Warm studio light from the north window, the glossy melting area catching a bright highlight. Faint heat distortion in the air above the surface. No text.

The Marble Steps

Orientation: portrait

Exterior photograph, the marble-paved steps connecting Ano Syros to Ermoupoli, seen from above looking down. The marble is white, worn smooth and slightly concave in the center from centuries of foot traffic. Whitewashed walls on both sides, close together, creating a narrow channel of shade. A strip of strong Mediterranean sun cutting across the steps at an angle, sharp-edged shadow and bright white light. Potted geraniums — red flowers, dark green leaves — on a stone ledge. The rooftops of Ermoupoli visible far below, and beyond them a strip of Aegean blue. Morning light, directional, from the east. In the style of Nikos Economopoulos's Cycladic photographs. No text.

Scraping Back

Orientation: square

Close-up photograph, a razor blade held flat against an encaustic panel surface, scraping back a too-thick passage of wax. Thin amber-ochre wax curls peeling away from the blade edge, translucent, like wood shavings. The exposed layer beneath is smoother, a slightly different value — the previous session's cooled paint, lighter where the white ground shows through. The birch panel grain just visible at the scraped edge. The razor blade reflecting a line of cool studio light. Wax dust and fine shavings scattered on the worktable. No text.

Finished Panel, Raking Light

Orientation: portrait

Encaustic portrait on birch panel, propped on the worktable and lit by raking light from the north window. The surface topography visible — ridges of thick wax on the forehead and cheekbones, thinner translucent passages in the shadows beneath the jaw. The portrait depicts an old man with deep-set eyes and a white stubble beard, painted in yellow ochre, burnt sienna, Indian red, and ivory black. The wax surface has a warm sheen, slightly glossy. The raking light catches every ridge and furrow, the surface casting tiny shadows within itself. The unpainted birch edge pale and clean. The stone wall behind, rough whitewashed plaster. No text.

The Box on the Shelf

Orientation: landscape

Interior photograph, a shelf in the studio against a rough stone wall. A closed cardboard box, slightly battered, its lid held shut with a rubber band. Next to the box, three cakes of solid colored beeswax — ochre, umber, white — and a small glass jar of damar resin crystals, pale amber. A used hog-bristle brush standing in a tin, its bristles stiff and splayed with dried wax. The postcard of Mytaras's painting visible at the top edge of the frame. Cool grey north light, the stone wall whitewashed and uneven. The shelf is wooden, its surface marked with drips and scorch marks. No text.