Nikos Eliadis

Fifty-five-year-old encaustic portrait painter on Syros, in the Cyclades. He paints with hot beeswax and pigment on birch panels — each brushstroke must be made within 3-5 seconds before the wax seizes. He judges his cestrum (heated metal tool) temperature by sound: a hiss means right, silence means too cool, a sizzle means you've just burned a hole in someone's cheek. His fingertips become featureless by evening as wax fills the whorls. The burn scar on his left wrist — his 'baptism' — is smooth and shiny, like the wax that made it.