In part three of this interview, Yama shares the art of candle making.
The basics are very simple. It’s like making bread, where you need flour, salt and water. It’s the same with a candle: you need wax, colour and a wick. And the wick needs to be cotton. Why? Because if it’s plastic it makes black smoke. My teacher, Don Miguel Benitez, was very strict about that, very strict about always using good materials.
I must say that the job is simple but, as with any other job, it’s also about being there. I mean, you must go and fetch the materials, load them into the car, drive, unload, prepare the moulds, then clean the moulds afterwards. You have to prepare a lot.
When I started out, I didn’t have much money to invest in the setting up of the workshop. I needed some moulds, and then because I wanted to make candles in different colours, I needed many pots in which to melt the wax, one pot for each colour… Then I would have needed, too, other larger pots to put the smaller ones in, because the wax has to be melted in bain marie.
Until I realized, “Forget about the many pots, I will get a big pot for the transparent/white wax and then I will add the colour to the wax in the mould.” I so avoided having to have a separate pot for each colour.
My teacher worked with small pots where he dissolved the colour in the wax before pouring it into the moulds. But he made small candles. I wanted to make big candles. He said to me, “You are crazy, to whom are you going to sell these big candles, tell me?”
“Don’t you worry,” I replied.
So I started to throw the colour powder straight into the mould. I was using oil-based aniline dyes. Each candle then got its unique colour: orange, red, yellow, blue, green, turquoise.
The process is simple. You have to have a mould, let’s say a cylinder, though it could have many other shapes. The bottom of the mould has a hole through which you pass the wick plus a piece of wire which will hold the wick in place. The wick needs to be straight and at the very centre of the candle. To close the hole at the bottom, and to hold the wick and wire in place, I use a piece of plasticine.
I soon realized that the wax started drying from the outside to the inside. So, after a while you have to make holes around the wick and start feeding it with fresh wax. If you don’t do that there will be air bubbles between the wick and the candle. It would then happen that suddenly the flame goes out because the wick is no more fed by the wax. A hole is no good. So you have to wait and keep adding wax, at least twice. Some candles have to wait twenty-four hours until you can fill them up again.
The next day I remove the wire, and the candle comes out of the mould. If I make a candle today it’s ready by tomorrow.
Another thing that’s important: I realized that the top of the candle changes shape when it dries, and becomes uneven. Sometimes when the weather is very cold, it dries faster. In winter it’s very hard to work because of the drop in temperature. You need to keep a steady temperature. So, I started to turn the candles upside down; what was the bottom became the top; the bottom was always neat because it was at the bottom of the mould!
You asked what the moulds are made from. There are many possibilities. Don Miguel Benitez used gesso. With gesso you can make a figure, a Buddha, for instance. But in the beginning I didn’t want to make figures. I wanted to make forms with light. If you have a Buddha candle, you are never going to light it. You will buy one in a lifetime. And “Bye, bye, customer!” I need to make a living by making candles that you use every day!
Another reason why I didn’t want to make gesso moulds then was that in Chile 30 years ago it was so difficult to find a toolmaker. These are old skills that have been disappearing. You will also have to invest a lot of money and time. And the moulds break easily. Sometimes they don’t come out right. So I started investigating into various materials that I could use for moulds.
I didn’t like metal ones because they get too hot to manipulate. Also, sometimes if your wax is too hot, the plasticine that you use to plug the bottom will melt and the wax starts to flow out. And you cannot move these moulds easily because they get very hot.
I use a different material – acrylic, but it’s expensive. It doesn’t get hot and it’s transparent. So you can see the design; you can see the aesthetics of the candle while making it. And when the candle comes out, the skin of the candle is beautiful! Smooth as glass. The finish is beautiful. For many years I made lots of pyramids in many different sizes. I even made a huge one, weighing 40 kilos!
Once a guy stopped by my shop. He loved my candles. I asked him what he was working with. He said, “Oh, with acrylics,” so I suggested, “Why don’t we do something together?” He made me forty or fifty different moulds. The thing with acrylic is, because it’s basically a glue, the moulds are very delicate, and break after a while. So now I have just two or three of them left.
I kept on and on investigating what kind of moulds I could use. And then I realized that water pipes, which you can buy from the building trade, are made from PVC – and they are also very cheap. You can easily cut them to size by yourself. They even come with a lid. So, if a candle does not come out by itself, you can just take the lid off and push it out. It’s universal.
Ninety percent of my candles are now moulded in PVC. You can get the pipes in big and small diameter. If one breaks, you just go to the shop and buy another one. Of course it’s more difficult to make special shapes, but I realized after making many special shapes, that cylinders are the best. I have square moulds also, and a few pyramids, but now just small ones.
Once you have your mould, you melt the wax in a big metal pot. I usually melt 20 kg in one go. Then with a thermometer I measure the temperature, and when it reaches 80° C it is ready to pour. I pour the wax into the mould, and add the aniline colours that come in powder form. I spread the powder with a wire, like painting in brushstrokes. This way I get a wide range of tones of each colour.
The drying process is very important. In winter, when it’s cold, the candles dry faster, so every so often I have to remove the air bubbles by inserting a knife into the mould. Because as I have said, if you light a candle that has holes in it, either the flames goes out or the candle gets used up by the flame all at once. With large candles I have to repeat this procedure several times, and sometimes it takes me two days to make a candle.
Three years ago, I met a lady with whom I had, many years before, done a course. She had gotten together with a very rich guy in Chile, and she asked me to come to their house in Santiago. They had two fireplaces. I proposed for one fireplace to make a combination of big candles: orange, red, different tones, and for the other fireplace green ones: light green, dark green – to give the space colour, shape and light. Beautiful! They also used small 7×6 candles. They put them everywhere, it was a big house, and in every corner there was light… so magical.
I hired a friend and we started making candles in a production line. The lady needed one hundred in the exact same colour. So, instead of powder – with powder it’s really hard to judge how much colour you need, you need so little, and suddenly it comes out too yellow – I bought a kind of colour that comes as a solid cube. You then know exactly that for 10 kilos of wax you need 1 cube of colour, and it’s going to give you that particular shade. So we made one hundred of these candles.
In Santiago, many people have chimneys they cannot use because of pollution laws. They are like black holes in a room. So I started making candles for these chimneys, of different heights and diameters, and in many bright colours. When lit they are a spectacle!
In the beginning I noticed that people in Chile are afraid of colour. Everything in the house had to be off-white. But now people, when they see my candles, know that these are my candles. They have a peculiar intensity of colour.
With candles you have so many possibilities. It’s a trade that is so compassionate – because in effect there are no ugly candles. Each candle is always unique. Nowadays all these traditional trades are disappearing from the world because of automation and machines. Same goes with shoemakers; you don’t fix shoes anymore. You throw them out, because you get Chinese shoes that cost two dollars.
In these 28 years that I have been making candles, the world has changed very much. I think that if we don’t get back in touch with our ‘essential’ quality, we are going to disappear from this planet.
I have to tell you a story: When I was living in Poona I was always looking for a small Buddha. I looked around and never found one where the gesture of the statue reflected the inner world. They were always too stiff. But a sannyasin from Trinidad & Tobago, somebody that I had met before but didn’t really know well, was working with clay at the Ashram. So I asked him, “Hey, do you think you could make a small Buddha for me?”
“Oh yeah, sure.”
Then I forgot all about it.
And one day he came, “Hey Yama, it’s ready!” And it was Wow! Really, really beautiful, and this Buddha was with me for years and years. I took it with me everywhere.
While we were living in Elqui – I already had my first child with Copihue – there was a fire at our place, a house fire. We had an iron-cast wood stove, and a piece of paper or kindling must have escaped the chimney flue and set fire to the thatched roof. A disaster: the whole house burnt down. Next day while looking at what was left of the house – you will not believe it – I found the Buddha almost intact. The head had broken off, but I could glue it back on. It had survived the fire!
About three years ago I said to my friend, Claudio Guajardo, the wicks master, “I have this Buddha that I love so much and I would like to make a mould for beeswax Buddhas to put on altars.” Claudio told me there was a new material for figures: silicone rubber; it’s expensive but the result is perfect. And so it was, the face of the Buddha is beautiful, it reflects the inner space of peace and joy that I had been trying for years to find. It was hard work for Claudio and there was the risk that the mould melted if you didn’t do it right. And then you lose the material, which, as I said, is expensive.
So, a few years ago for Christmas I made beeswax Buddhas for a few friends as gifts. Some I also sold and presented in a small box, together with two small candles, one on each side. In your home, in a particular place, you might have an altar of Presence. It would fit there, to help you remember. This Buddha is about 20 cm high and weighs about a kilo. I made about ten of them.
Because after a while the rubber starts breaking a bit each time you need to take the mould apart. I don’t think it would last much longer. So, it’s only for special gifts. I still have the mould, and from time to time I make some for gifts.
For the past few years I have been teaching at Sename, a government institution for low-income children and young people with family histories of abandonment and drug addiction. It has been a gift to share with them and give them the opportunity to have a trade that helps them overcome their situation.
To conclude, I would like to say that candles have been for me a way to share and to be creative. And to create a link with the world, a link to the intimacy of people with an inspiring object that is beautiful, useful and simple and that helps them connect with the subtle .
As a species we are living in challenging times: technology has allowed us to be more connected but we have somehow lost contact with the essential. The candles are my contribution to help us not forget that, and to rescue the light that resides inside each one of us.
Related articles
- A déjà vu – Part 1 of Yama’s story – taking sannyas and getting involved in the communes
- Elqui Valley – In part two, Yama talks about his new life in his native Chile, after the commune years
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