In the years after Johns's acclaimed inaugural show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958, encaustic began to surface, so to speak, among other painters. Working minimally in the late sixties into the seventies, both Brice Marden and Lynda Benglis produced bodies of work in wax. Marden's large-scale expanses, each a quiet presence with a soft matte face, were not true encaustic -"oil remains the primary binder," he wrote in a technical statement - where as Benglis's slim columns, also reductive in color and surface, were created with wax, resin, pigment, and heat as true encaustic.

Rachel Friedberg turned to encaustic in 1974, looking, she says, "for a mysterious surface onto which I could suspend thoughts." Aware of Johns's work, but unfamiliar with the medium beyond the basics, she telephoned Frances Pratt when the latter's book proved hard to find. "She must have been well into her eighties at the time," says Friedberg. "I asked if she had a copy I could buy. She didn't. But she told me, 'Oh dearie, just take a pencil and I'll tell you waht to do.'" Thus provided with basic recipes directly from the author, Friedberg learned on her own by trial and error.