Using a menu of impromptu, homemade mediums (cooking oil, tobacco juice, candle wax), he worked in a cramped, one-room studio piled high "with every kind of object old newspapers, painting materials, soiled cloths, food, unwashed dishes, ashes, " according to Lloyd Goodrich, the artist's champion in later decades.

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With a torch, I could see candle wax on the small pillars close to the centre of the tomb.

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But Eli's selling more kind of random bric-a-brac, like corncobs and candle wax.

NPR: A Journey with the Decemberists

Using a handheld glue gun, and armed with a home-cooked slurry of polyethylene and candle wax, he built the shape layer by layer.

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