Tony Scherman is best known for his encaustic method of painting combining pigment and wax to create works with multiple layers and a remarkable sense of depth.

Tony Scherman’s painting practice has been steadfastly figurative in order to engage what can be described as the slippage between the cultural and intellectual dimensions of myth, literature and history. He is drawn to the human journey—that which speaks to all of us—through episodes that bear witness to history and imprints on the psyche. But Scherman is neither a history nor a moralistic painter. He paints to understand the contingencies of our world and with source material that is extracted from the public domain of film, photography, and magazines, as well as from life, and does not privilege any single source. An apt summation of Scherman’s work and ideas comes from David Moos, head curator of modern and contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Ontario from 2004-2011, from a Tony Scherman feature article inToronto Lifemagazine, March 2007:

He’s deeply steeped in the European tradition, taking inspiration from 17th-century artists like Rembrandt and Franz Hals and, in more recent times, from the likes of Van Gogh, Thomas Eakins and Lucian Freud. But Tony also has this very contemporary disposition—and his project is about the new image culture in which we live.

Over the same period of time Tony Scherman has developed encaustic as a preferred and primary painting medium, which he describes as a personal vocabulary—a remarkable achievement because this steps beyond the “typical mastery” of a medium. Scherman is widely recognized for a recovery and restoration of encaustic from history—it was first used almost 2000 years ago and pre-dated oil paint, which did not come into wide use until the 15thcentury—but also its re-development and re-deployment in the service of our times. In brief, a side reference to Marshall McLuhan, “the medium carries the message.”

Courtesy of Eastation Gallery