

In the wake of two other posts on crayons as an art medium, I came across the work of artist Christian Faur who, among his other work in oil, encaustics, fabric and fiber, uses wax crayons as a medium in a completely different way.

Using hand cast encaustic crayons (that are still essentially similar to Crayola Crayons), Faur sets them into position, on end, in arrangements of the crayons themselves that, based on the value and hue of the individual crayons, forms an image when seen from a sufficient distance.

This still recaptures some of the innocence and playfulness of childhood crayons and other toys (remember “Lite Brite”?), but uses the crayons as a combination assemblage and image creation medium.

There are several experimental variations in which Faur explores the idea, many of them almost monochromatic except for sharp punctuations of brighter colors, others are full color like the image above, Experiment 5 (shown with a detail of the surface).

One of his other artistic experiments involve assigning colored crayons as letters in a “Color Aalphabet” and then using them to interpret literary passages, for instance from Hamlet. He goes into detail here about how the colors were chosen.

[Via Gizmodo, thanks also to Bram Meehan]