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11
Nero’s Birthday, encaustic
on canvas, 40 x 36"
2
Arcana Mundi, encaustic
on canvas, 64 x 64"
3
Mark Antony, encaustic
on canvas, 84 x 84"
4
The Last Mussel,
encaustic on canvas,
60 x 72"UPCOMING SHOW PREVIEW / WINSTON WÄCHTER FINE ART
Through 12/31 New York, NYT
ony Scherman’s exhibition Pictures
from Rome is not a picture postcard
tour of the Eternal City. “I wanted to paint
around Rome instead of zeroing in on one
particular narrative,” he explains. “I wanted
to put out an idea which didn’t really have
a nucleus. The paintings in this show came
to mind thinking about Rome. I grew up in
the ’50s. The generation before had been
about cowboys and Indians. In about 1960
the myths of Rome and Greece came in.
I have had an interest and been a student
of Roman history for decades.”
Among the pictures is a closely cropped
monumental portrait of Marc Antony
at 7-feet square. “Marc Antony was one
of the great deficient males in history,”
Scherman comments. “He had extraordi-
nary, seething ambition. He was basically
a gangster. His rise is clear and then he
meets Cleopatra [at] the height of his arc.
Then he descended.” Scherman depicts
him covered in blood at the Battle of
Philippi, a civil war in 42 BCE following the
assassination of Julius Caesar. The forces
of Mark Antony and Octavian (Caesar’s
heir) fought against Brutus and Cassius,
his assassins.
Scherman pioneered the revival of theTONY SCHERMANPictures from Rome
ancient technique of encaustic, which involves wax mixed with
oil paint and pigments. He scrapes, drips and burns the encaustic
to create luminous and textured surfaces. As he perfected his
technique, he learned that every painting is a practice “but only
perfect practice makes perfect. Technically, I’ve gotten better and
better and better. At the Royal College of Art that was my mission.
I didn’t have talent but I had a good eye and pictorial taste. I didn’t
have facility. I worked for every square inch.”
He refers to the German art historian and theorist Hans Belting
who wrote about the surface of the painting and the surface of the
skin in a portrait. “My ability to collapse those two things is better,”
Scherman explains. “I see the skin on the surface as a sensation of
skin, not an optical illusion. It’s an esoteric component. When I paint
I both affirm and deny the surface. I create another world behind the
picture frame. I’ve reached a higher level of exhibiting both.”2