encrustation

Spotting the vases, he chipped the encrustation off one of them and was convinced what he was holding in his hands was celadon, an extremely valuable East Asian stoneware characterized by its beautiful blue-green glaze.

Mostly, Hynes called him O’Casey, but a few times she called him Sean, and the warmth of that familiarity melted away any sepia encrustation that has accumulated around his name.

“The only way is to work precisely with special magnifying glasses, removing all the small encrustations one by one,” she said.

On most of these canvases it’s like a thick encrustation of gunk.

“Fall River Boiler,” a black-and-white image that he photographed in 1978 and printed a decade or so later, is a nocturne of texture and tone: feathery asbestos, gloppy encrustations, circular black holes.