Beeswax, resin and pigment.

Those are the building blocks of encaustic, an ancient art form that is experiencing a 21st century renaissance.

Pioneered by the Greeks, encaustic is, essentially, painting with liquid pigmented wax, a fast-drying medium that can be applied in layers, poured over objects to create collages or carved and shaped to make small sculptures or provide dramatic relief on a flat surface.

This month, the Haydon Art Center is home to "Metamorphosis: Contemporary Statements in Encaustic," a national juried exhibition assembled in conjunction with International Encaustic Artists, a group formed three years ago to promote the use of encaustic in fine art.

The show, which runs through March 28, is notable not only because it showcases encaustic, but because the old medium is providing what juror George Neubert calls an "interesting antithesis to what you see today graphically."

Much of today's art, rooted in digital media, is flat and works only through surface optics. Encaustic is almost its opposite:

"It's three dimensional, it has texture, it has depth," said Neubert, former director of the Sheldon and San Antonio, Texas, art museums. "The physical process of the creation has much to do with the end piece. That is getting rarer and rarer. That's one of the reasons this is becoming popular again."

"Again," in this case, is a very long time. As in more than 2,500 years.

The name encaustic comes from the Greek word "encaustikos," meaning to heat or burn in, and was applied to the use of molten wax, first as an application to portraits and murals.

"Then someone discovered they could preserve the ships better if they applied wax to the bottom of the boats," said Margaret Berry, a Lincoln encaustic artist and one of the exhibition's organizers. "It wasn't much of a step to add color to the wax. They used it to decorate their ships. Then, because those cultures were so interconnected, the Romans took it and used it to colorize their statues."

The history of encaustic on ships and statues is based only on writings from the period. None of the work survived into the modern era - the ships sank long ago, and the wax peeled off the statues, leaving a stain at most.

But early encaustic can be seen in Fayum portraits that date from 100 B.C. to 200 A.D. The head-and-shoulders wax portraits of prominent individuals were set into their mummy casings, preserving their images for the afterlife. About 600 of the portraits done in Greece and Egypt exist today and are scattered throughout museums around the world.

But encaustic faded away, largely because of the limitations of working with the wax, particularly the difficulty in keeping it liquefied.

"They didn't have electricity, basically," Berry said.

When the Fayum portraits were unearthed in the late 1800s, encaustic regained some visibility. In the 1920s, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera worked with wax, as did American painter Arthur Dove a decade later.

But the modern use of encaustic dates to the mid-1950s and a single artist - Jasper Johns.

Tired of waiting for paint to dry, the young, ambitious Johns turned to the ancient technique, applying pigmented beeswax to canvas.

"I went out and bought some wax and started working," Johns told Vanity Fair magazine in 1984. "It was just right for me. Everything I did became cleaner."

Many of Johns' signature works, such as "White Flag" and "Green Target" from 1955, were done in encaustic. He has continued to work in the medium throughout his career, creating pieces such as 1986's "Fall."

Johns, one of the pivotal artists of the late '50s and early '60s, helped inspire the use of encaustic by the likes of Brice Marden, Lynda Benglis and Rachel Friedberg. They and others kept the medium alive in contemporary art in the '70s through the '90s, when the current encaustic boom began.

The 38 works in "Metamorphosis" are representative of the varied styles and techniques used in contemporary encaustic. More importantly, it is a showcase for some extremely well-crafted art, regardless of medium.

"The overall quality of the show was one of the strongest national shows I've juried," Neubert said. "The entries were extremely high quality and highly competitive. A lot of times, 70 to 80 percent, you throw away. There's less figurative work than you'd normally see in a juried show today. Maybe the process demands a kind of lyrical abstraction."

That process starts with liquefying the wax and adding the resin that hardens the piece. Then the multiple options of encaustic kick in.

Heated on a pancake griddle, cans of the liquefied wax/resin mixture with pigment applied create a broad palette of color that can be used to paint on a support, most often board. Those paintings can then be heated with a heat gun - your hair dryer isn't hot enough - to create a smooth finish. Layer upon layer of wax and pigment can be applied.

The wax can also be poured on support with objects embedded inside. It also takes photo transfers. The wax can be formed into small sculptures and carved with various tools, including dentist's instruments

"It really is an infectious process, I think," said organizer/encaustic artist Susan Joan Schenk. "I'm coming from police photography and I'm now doing the fine art end. I'm hooked. I just love the medium."

There's one big difference between encaustic and nearly every other media: Artists often encourage people to touch their finished work.

"This is a very sensuous process," Berry said. "Touching the piece actually improves it. When you finish, the last thing you do is buff the piece. Because of the resin in the wax, it allows it to get very shiny. So the saying we have is 'Let your friends touch the piece, it improves it. If you don't have any friends, use a cloth.'"

There's no touching of the work on display at Haydon. But there is plenty there for the eyes, including:

* Sherrie Posternak's "In Her Veins" uses photo transfer to float a repeating image of a Native woman and a weaving inside the wax. The colors of each quadrant change slightly, growing ever more blue, resulting in a resonant image that hints of Andy Warhol's repetitive pieces.

* Deborah Kruger's "Plumage No. 9" creates gorgeously colored "feathers" using encaustic on linen to make a distinctive piece of fiber art.

* "Sedimentary Series, Trans Sienna," an impressive diptych, one side smooth, one side highly textured, incorporates graphite, asphaltum and sediment into the beewax, creating a heavy, earth-like feel to the piece. It's by Mari Marks, a 77-year-old from Iowa who Schenk calls one of the true masters of the medium.

Other pieces in the show hint at old master art, one uses coffee grounds to create "soil," another incorporates tea bags. Others contain butterfly wings, leaves, seeds and flowers.

"There's no end to this process," Berry said. "There's no beginning and no end … In the last 10 years, we've seen a real advance in the contemporary encaustic movement. You can see that in this show."

Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com.