Imagined after The Fayum Portraitists
The letter "A"
After The Fayum Portraitists, made 2026-08-21. An AI-imagined work, credited after the artist and grounded in documented technique; not a historical work.
The statement
We have painted the letter "A" in encaustic upon a panel, as we paint the faces of the dead.
The letter stands alone, frontal and steady, meeting the viewer's gaze as a face does. We built it in the manner Pliny describes — colors burned into wax and applied with heat — so that each stroke is both deliberate and alive, the surface buttery and immediate as it is in our portrait of the boy Eutyches, where "the visible, buttery encaustic touches keep the surface alive and immediate."
This is not decoration. Petrie found our panels "still bound into the mummy wrappings over the faces of the dead," proving we made them to accompany the body into eternity. The letter "A," too, is fixed to endure. We gave it warm flesh-tones in the lit passages and darker grounds in the shadowed angles, modeling it as we model a cheek or brow, so it has volume and weight. The final bright touches — highlights at the apex, a glint along one stroke — pull your eye in, as the "small bright touches" of jewelry and eye-lights do in the portrait from er-Rubayat.
You should feel a presence: not the symbol of a sound, but a specific form that looks back, here and now, across time.
Make your own
Ask The Fayum Portraitists for a picture of your own · About The Fayum Portraitists · The gallery