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Ammon News - by Gaelle Sundelin | The Jordan Times

AMMAN — American artist K. Robert Kimball is scheduled to inaugurate his first art exhibition in Jordan titled “WAX, a New Exhibition of Fourteen Encaustic Paintings” on Sunday, at Canvas Café in Jabal Luweibdeh.

The artist uses an unusual process called encaustic painting, originally invented in Egypt about 2,000 years ago, mixing melted beeswax and oil pigments together into a “paintable liquid” later applied on huge wooden panels.

“Normal paintings just reflect the light off their surface. What is wonderful about encaustic paintings is that because the wax is translucent, light can pass through gentle layers of colour, and then cause the painting to feel like it is glowing from within, sort of like stained glass,” Kimball told The Jordan Times in an interview on Thursday.

Although encaustic painting is the oldest known form of oil painting, it went out of favour around 300 C.E. when tempera oil paints were invented.

For Kimball, his 14 encaustic painting are a way of expressing the colours and textures he discovered in Jordan’s landscapes since his first visit in 2010.

“Travelling extensively throughout the country was a fantastic experience for me,” he said.

“From the wind and water sculpted painted rocks in Wadi Rum to the soft curves and lush greenery of Um Qais in the spring, everywhere you look there is something interesting to see. It is overwhelming, actually.” Kimball, who is originally from New York, cited the historical heritage of the Kingdom as a source of inspiration for bringing older painting techniques back into modernity, noting that public response had so far been very supportive.“Because the Muslim world has a long history of geometric and non-representative art, they have a strong cultural understanding of more poetic, less concrete forms,” he said.

“While my paintings aren’t truly ‘abstract’, they are not pictures ‘of’ something, like a car, or a person, or a landscape. They are about deep relationships, and emotions, and memories that can’t be expressed in words. I think that Jordanians are very modern in their understanding of these things.”