Encantos: When the Work Speaks Back

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I just returned home from Taos and the opening of our Encantos Exhibition at the Taos Ceramics Center with fellow artists Linda Manning and Virginia and Andy Bally.

I’m still processing the experience. There’s a particular kind of moment at an exhibition opening that feels both exhilarating and disorienting—the moment when the work leaves your hands and begins its own conversations.

At the opening, that moment arrived quickly and unexpectedly. Within a short time, all four of the Santa Niña collages (below) had sold.

These were not the pieces I assumed would lead the way. I loved them, of course—but I hadn’t predicted they would be the first to be claimed. It felt less like a market response and more like recognition, as if those works had been waiting for the right room, the right eyes, the right moment to step forward.

That surprise relaxed me. It loosened and changed my expectations and opened me to the evening in a different way.

What followed was not just an opening, but a long, layered exchange—one conversation flowing into another. People asked thoughtful questions about symbolism, materials, saints and fragments, memory and devotion. I spoke about the work more than I usually do, and perhaps more openly. But just as important, I listened. I asked others about their work—their processes, their obsessions, the stories that quietly fuel what they make. And I learned so much.

There’s a misconception that openings are about standing beside your work and explaining it, as if clarity were the goal. But what struck me that night was how much richer the experience became when explanation turned into dialogue.

When I asked, “What are you working on?” or “What draws you to this?” the room shifted.

  • Artists spoke about uncertainty, about being mid-question, about following symbols they didn’t yet fully understand.
  • Two of my workshops students talked about the excitement of their new directions since we all worked together.
  • Collectors shared what they live with, what they notice over time, what stays with them years after a piece comes home.
  • An actor who “moved to Taos 55 years ago in the great hippie migration” shared with me his work on Samuel Beckett’s plays.
  • And my new friend, Japanese/American architect and master woodworker, Sam Takeuchi came up from Santa Fe to talk about portraits.

It reminded me that exhibitions aren’t endpoints—they’re crossings.

Still, I won’t pretend that speaking about one’s work comes easily. There is something inherently vulnerable about explaining art that is born from intuition, memory, and personal myth. Much of my work emerges before I have language for it. The words come later—sometimes much later. Standing in front of people and trying to translate that interior process can feel awkward, even frightening. There’s always the fear of saying too much, or not enough. Or sounding pretentious or too woo-woo.

But then something extraordinary happens. Someone listens closely. Someone nods. Someone offers a reflection that mirrors back what you were reaching for—sometimes in language clearer than your own. And in that moment, the work feels understood not because it’s been decoded, but because it’s been met.

What Encantos offered me was a renewed trust in that exchange. Trust that the work carries more than I consciously put into it. Trust that certain pieces know where they belong Trust that conversation—real conversation—is part of the creative process, not a distraction from it.

I left the opening feeling deeply grateful: for the collectors who welcomed the Santa Niñas into their homes; for the artists whose generosity and curiosity enriched the evening; for the reminder that meaning doesn’t arrive fully formed in the studio.It completes itself in relationship—through artists like Andre and Virginia Bally and Linda Manning, whose thoughtful, generous work completed the Encantos cosmology and transformed the exhibition into a shared experience.

Encantos, after all, is about enchantment—not as spectacle, but as recognition. The moment when something familiar suddenly reveals depth. The feeling that a fragment holds a story larger than itself—and that night, I understood that Encantos was not an ending, but a threshold toward a new direction.

Thanks for reading! 

On the value of a Circle

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There’s a moment in creative life when nothing looks complete, but something feels undeniably alive. The work on the table may feel uncertain or oddly formless—but underneath that, there’s a hum.

In my last post, I wrote about the imaginal disc stage—that mysterious phase when a future form already exists within us, long before it’s visible. I’ve been thinking about how often artists arrive here not because something has failed, but because something has completed. A body of work ends. A show closes. A direction resolves. And suddenly there’s space—an in-between space that eventually became the foundation for The Enso Circle.

Over time, I’ve noticed that artists often reach out during this phase—not asking what should I make next? so much as how do I stay with what’s forming? There’s a desire for thoughtful conversation, for a few steady points of reflection, for reassurance that “not knowing” is not a failure of practice, but an essential stage of it.

This is where the idea of a circle becomes important. This is why the Enso Circle exists.

Applications open Feb. 1

The Enso Circle began taking shape in conversations that Michelle Belto and I started having back in 2015—ongoing conversations about creative practice, community, and what artists actually need. From the beginning, it wasn’t about acceleration or productivity, but about honoring a particular path of becoming.

It’s now in its 11th term. Since 2021, artists from five countries and 20 states have participated in The Enso Circle, forming a supportive creative community grounded in shared inquiry, reflection, and growth.

Each Enso Circle term unfolds over twelve weeks, allowing time for ideas to surface, shift, and deepen without being rushed.

  • It’s long enough for real momentum to build, and gentle enough to accommodate the realities of life and studio rhythms.
  • The residency fee is intentionally modest—comparatively less than many single weekend workshops—because sustained support should feel accessible and humane.
  • Throughout the term, artists stay connected—to one another, and to Michelle and me—through ongoing conversation on Zoom and Slack with shared reflection, and consistent support as the work takes shape.

In the Enso Circle, twelve artists artists come together with work that is unfinished, unresolved, or perhaps changing direction. Some are beginning something new; others are letting go of what no longer fits. What they share is not a style or medium, but a willingness to stay present with the process and let the work reveal itself over time.

The clearest expression of what happens in the Enso Circle has come not through description, but through the residents’ work itself. The Enso Circle residency catalogs—created at the end of each term—speak quietly through the residents’ artwork. They reflect many individual paths, shaped by time, reflection, and community. You can explore those catalogs here.

If you find yourself here now—between what was and what’s coming—know that you’re not alone. This stage isn’t something to fix or solve. It’s something to tend. I’ve just put together a little video on Advice for Enso Circle Residents – if you become one of the twelve new residents, this will be for you!

Applications for the next Enso Circle open on February 1. If this reflection resonates, you’ll know. There’s no push—just an invitation to notice where you are, and what kind of support might help you stay with what’s becoming.

JOIN THE WAITLIST FOR INFORMATION ON APPLYING

Stay warm, stay brave. Thank you for reading. Ours is important work, and courage grows in company.  ~~ Lyn

LEARN MORE ABOUT REQUIREMENTS AND COST

 

The Imaginal Disc Stage of Creative Metamorphosis

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What a long title for a post! Read on . . . .

I first heard the phrase “imaginal disc” yesterday in a post from Donna Towers, one of our Enso Circle residents. She wrote that she was in the “Imaginal Disc Stage” with her pod structure exploration.

Donna Towers: Pod Two, Gift of Acceptnce

That phrase, “imaginal disc,” stopped me cold. I didn’t know exactly what it meant yet, but it felt instantly familiar—like something I already understood in my body. So I looked it up.

An imaginal disc is that strange, silent thing inside a caterpillar that already knows it will become a wing (see the wing pouch i the diagram below). It doesn’t look like a wing. It isn’t useful yet. And at first, the caterpillar’s immune system even tries to destroy it. But eventually, that tiny cluster of cells becomes the organizing force of the entire transformation.

When I read that, it landed like a small flash of déjà vu.

Because I know that stage.
I’ve lived in that stage.  – in fact, am living in it now.
I just didn’t have a name for it.

It’s the phase where any new work doesn’t make sense yet. Where it feels scattered, awkward, or unfinished. It’s the stage where the work doesn’t look like what it will become—and sometimes doesn’t even look like it belongs to me. And I realized how often I’m in that stage right after the work for a  exhibition like Encantos is finished, packed, and sent off.

There’s a strange quiet after the work is gone. The adrenaline drains out of my body, and I’m left with this little hollow feeling I never quite expect, even though it happens every time.

For a long while, everything in me has been shaped around one body of work. It had a rhythm. A vocabulary. A gravity. Its own universe! And then it’s finished. Sent out into the world. No longer needing me in the same way.

And that can feel scary. But now I realize that it is often the beginning of the imaginal disc stage. I love that metaphor!

The old form has done its work. Something in me has loosened. But the new thing isn’t visible yet. This is the moment when I’m most tempted to rush. To make something just to make something. To repeat what worked. To grab onto any shape that will make the uncertainly go away.

But transformation doesn’t work like that.

This part asks for trust. It asks me to sit with what I don’t understand yet. To pay attention to the scraps that won’t leave me alone.

A color.
A word.
A shape.
A feeling I can’t explain – like the phrase imaginal disc that suddenly felt like serendipity.

These collected separate shards and notions don’t look like wings. They don’t even look useful. But they carry something inside them. There are possibilities here . . . . .

I think my job in this stage isn’t to decide what comes next. It’s to protect what feels alive, even when it doesn’t make sense yet. And if my caterpillar self can’t see it, maybe it’s because something new is just beginning to grow there—patiently learning how to become wings.Or legs! Or antennae …or maybe a hundred tiny things I don’t have names for yet. Yay for the Imaginal Disc Stage of Creative Metamorphosis!

The Rules of an Invented World

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As I am packing the work for the Taos Ceramics Center Exhibition, Encantos, I realize I am packing up an entire intuitive universe. And every invented universe has its own logic — not the kind you can diagram neatly—but a felt logic. A rhythm. A set of silent agreements between the maker and the materials.

Over time, you start to notice what belongs in that universe and what doesn’t. Certain colors feel native – terra cotta and Prussian blue. Certain shapes return like familiar faces – arcs and circles. Certain gestures carry more weight than others – crossed hands.

In the Encantos universe, the rules for the four Santa Niñas encaustic collages are simple and a bit strange:

  • Wax protects.
    Paper remembers.
    Gold listens.
    Heat transforms.
    Layers hold time.

I didn’t write these rules down at the beginning. They revealed themselves by repeatedly showing up. Every time I worked, the materials taught me what they wanted to mean. That’s one of the pleasures of personal myth-making—you don’t invent everything at once. You discover it as you go, the way a traveler learns a landscape by walking through it.

Lyn Belisle Santa Niña de la Luz Silenciosa (Silent Light) (2026)

This is why cosmologies in art don’t have to be planned. They can be grown, like the Encantos universe, with its Santa Niña collages, its Encanto Altars, and its Mendicant Messengers (which I’ll tell you more about next time).

Characters Who Carry Feelings

So once a universe exists, it asks for inhabitants, at least this one did.

The four Santa Niñas are not portraits of people. They are portraits of states of being. Each one holds a feeling that kept showing up in my studio: tenderness, protection, not-knowing, rootedness, inner light. Giving those feelings faces—and names—made them easier to sit with.

  • This is another gift of storytelling in art:
    We can give shape to what has no shape.

Instead of saying “I’m working with vulnerability,” I can say, “This is Santa Niña del Corazón Guardado.” (Guarded Heart)

Instead of “I don’t know what comes next,” I can say, “This is Santa Niña de los Ojos Velados.”(Veiled Eyes)

A character can hold what a sentence cannot.

And once a character exists, you can talk to her. Work with her. Ask what she wants to protect, carry, or reveal. Suddenly, the studio becomes a place of conversation, not just production.

Santa Niña del Corazón Raíz
(Santa Nina of the Rooted Heart)

Materials as Myth

In personal cosmologies, materials are never neutral, they become actors in the story.

  • Wax isn’t just wax—it is shelter, skin, veil, cocoon.
    Mulberry paper isn’t just paper—it is memory, breath, fragility.
    Gold leaf isn’t just decoration—it is listening, blessing, attention.

Every time I melt wax over paper, I am repeating a ritual of care: cover, warm, seal, open again. That repetition is how meaning settles into matter. You don’t have to declare symbolism. If something keeps showing up, it is already symbolic.

Play Is Not Frivolous

One of the common misconceptions artists absorb is that “seriousness” equals “legitimacy”.

But myth is not built through seriousness alone. It is built through play: naming things, trying on stories, letting images talk back, changing your mind, making something just to see what happens.

Play is how children understand the world. It is also how artists do.To make a cosmology for your work is not to pretend you know more than you do. It is to admit that you don’t—and to answer that not-knowing with imagination instead of fear.

  • You are allowed to say:
    “In my world, this means something.”
    Even if no one else agrees.
    Even if you change it later.

Myth-making is not a contract. It is a conversation.

An Invitation

You don’t need saints, or vessels, or wings, or gold.

Your cosmology might be built from kitchens, streets, trees, broken cups, dogs, storms, old photographs, or scraps of handwriting. It might be loud or quiet, humorous or solemn, tidy or chaotic. What matters is not what it looks like—but that it belongs to you.

Ask yourself:

  • What images keep returning?
    What materials feel like home?
    What stories are trying to form without words?
    If your work lived in a world, what kind of world would it be?

You don’t have to explain it to anyone.
You don’t even have to understand it fully yourself.

You just have to keep building it—one symbol, one layer, one small act of making at a time. Keep notes. Pay attention. Show us.

That’s how personal myth is born.

If you want to learn more about the world of the Santa Niñas, your can follow this link.

Being Sick, Making Less, and the Shape of Happiness

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I’m just coming out of a truly miserable bout of cold/flu—one of those that flattens you completely and makes even small decisions feel like effort.

I even missed delivering work to a happiness-themed show at Mockingbird Handprints because I was sick. And while a part of me felt that familiar tug—I should push through, I should rally—the truth was simpler: it just had to be. There was no bargaining with the body this time.

That irony didn’t escape me. Missing a happiness show because of illness feels almost comic, until you sit with it a little longer.

Here’s one of the little the unfinished encaustic collage that may eventually get there – it says, “Happiness is choosing a branch that will hold you.” I was hanging onto the branch!

bird collage

You probably know that being sick has a way of rearranging things. Time slows. Attention shrinks. The body insists on being heard, and the mind—used to running ahead with plans and ideas—has to follow along more humbly.

When my brothers were here for a holiday visit last week, we spent more time sitting, visiting, and reading than going out. It wasn’t the version of the visit any of us might have imagined, but it was the one that fit. Companionship replaced activity. Presence replaced plans. And unexpectedly, that felt like its own kind of happiness.

Illness has a way of stripping happiness of its performance. There’s no energy for cheerfulness or achievement. What’s left is something simpler: comfort, ease, being together without needing to do much at all. (I did whine a bit . . .)

I noticed this shift in my relationship to art, too. When energy is limited, making becomes smaller and more tentative. Thinking replaces doing. Looking replaces producing. And while that can feel frustrating at first, it often opens a deeper attentiveness.

During those sick days, I try not to expect “real work” of myself. Reading counts. Sorting images counts. Making notes, jotting words, imagining future pieces—those count too. Even napping feels connected to the work, as if something is magically aligning beneath the surface – hooray for naps.

Mostly, being sick reminds me that happiness—like art—is embodied. It doesn’t live only in accomplishment or output. It lives in breathing, stamina, attention, and recovery. Sometimes happiness looks like showing up. Sometimes it looks like staying home. Sometimes it looks like reading quietly with people you love while the rest of the world carries on without you.

Here’s another little unfinished encaustic collage – this one says, “Happiness lies in the balance between wing and branch.” Flying and resting, flying and resting —

Appropriately, the book I was reading when I got sick was Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. In it, he reflects on our finite capacities—on the simple, often uncomfortable truth that we cannot do everything, seize every opportunity, or live at full speed all the time.

What he offers instead is a kind of relief: the idea that a meaningful life isn’t built by overcoming our limits, but by choosing what matters within them, and letting the rest go without resentment. Reading that while sick felt less like instruction and more like permission.

I’m feeling better, and I’m carrying that permission with me, the permission to make less when less is what’s possible. To miss a show without turning it into a story of failure. To recognize that happiness, like art, isn’t always expansive or visible. Sometimes it’s the privilege to live honestly within the shape of the days we’re given. Help me remember that!!

 

 

 

Art has a soul – so what should it cost?

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As part of getting ready for my upcoming exhibition,  I’ve been thinking about the complicated subject of selling art—not from a business standpoint, but from a human one.

Mendicant Messenger: The Nest Keeper
Carries the knowledge that home is not claimed, but tended. Belonging is made through return, care, and the patient shaping of small, protective circles.

While working on my Encantos and Mendicant Messengers for the Taos show, it became very clear to me that there was no rational way to calculate their “value.” Every element was touched, considered, set aside, returned to, and finally placed with care. The work carried intention, patience, and a kind of spiritual listening that doesn’t show up on a spreadsheet. How do you put a price on that?

The Listener of Copper Paths:  The Listener of Copper Paths encanto watches over people who carry hidden worries.

And yet, I still want these pieces to find homes where they’re needed. I want them to be accessible. They need to continue their lives beyond my studio. Somewhere between devotion and practicality sits the uncomfortable question: How do we translate process into money?

The first thing I keep coming back to is this: price is not a measure of meaning. It never has been. Money doesn’t pay for the spirit that went into the work. It simply allows the work to move—from studio to world, from maker to keeper. Price is not a judgment of worth; it’s a translation tool, a bridge between inner labor and outer systems.

Accessibility doesn’t mean undervaluing. Sometimes it means trusting that the right person will recognize the work, not consume it casually. Sometimes it means allowing the exchange itself to be part of the ritual of letting go—an acknowledgment that something cared for is being received with care.

And then there’s the bigger question that makes me pause: Is selling the ultimate goal for artists? If it were, art would feel thinner somehow. More transactional. Less alive.

Historically, artists have been motivated by things far deeper than sales: witness, transmission, service, continuity, remembering. Selling is just one possible outcome of that work—not its moral endpoint. When selling becomes the goal, art loses something. When art remains the goal, selling becomes quieter, more humane—a way of releasing work responsibly into the world.

If you feel sensitive or conflicted about pricing your work, that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It means your work still matters to you. The sadness isn’t about money—it’s about not wanting what you’ve made to be reduced to a transaction.

We’re allowed to hold both truths at once:

This work is priceless in spirit.
This work needs a number so it can find its way.

That tension isn’t a failure. It’s a sign that the work still has a soul. In the end, pricing is not a test you pass or fail. You can seek counsel, follow structure, and change your mind—but the number you choose is simply the one that feels like a respectful release.

Gifts and Presence

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Gifts I’m Carrying Into the New Year

As the year turns, I find myself less interested in presents and resolutions and more drawn to offerings—the thoughtful, non-material gifts that actually sustain a creative life.

It’s been a year that asked a lot of us. One that felt heavy in ways that were hard to name, where clarity was scarce and holding steady sometimes counted as progress. In moments like that, I find myself returning to the work—not for answers, but for anchoring.

Three of the Seven Messengers, Earthenware and Found Objects, Lyn Belisle, 2025

In the Encanto collection I’m creating for the Taos exhibition, nothing begins as whole. Each piece is assembled from fragments: shards of material, memory, intuition, and story. Individually, they hold meaning. Together, they become something new—a vessel, a guardian, an altar that didn’t exist before their meeting.

That feels like the right metaphor for the year ahead. Not a clean beginning, but a gathering. A year shaped less by starting over than by recognizing what is already in our hands—saved fragments, carried questions, pieces that refused to be discarded.

The work ahead isn’t about inventing something entirely new, but about listening closely enough to hear how the shards and clues want to speak to one another, and trusting that connection itself is a form of creation.

For Robert Rauschenberg, especially in his Combines series, the work was rarely about inventing new imagery from scratch. Instead, it emerged from listening to what disparate materials wanted to say together: a quilt, a newspaper clipping, a photograph, a brushstroke, a found object.

assemblage

Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955-59 Freestanding combine Oil, printed paper, printed reproductions, metal, wood, rubber heel and tennis ball on canvas, with oil on angora goat and tyre on wooden base mounted on four casters, 106.6 x 160.6 x 163.8 cm

Individually, these elements carried their own histories. But when brought into proximity, they began a conversation that produced meaning neither could hold alone.

He trusted that relationship itself was generative. The act of placing, juxtaposing, and allowing tension or harmony to arise was the creative act. In that sense, the artwork wasn’t imposed—it was discovered through attentive assembly. This concept means the world to me.

Robert Rauschenberg, Odalisk, 1955-1958 Freestanding combine Oil, watercolour, crayon, pastel, paper, fabric, photographs, printed reproductions, newspaper, metal, glass, pillow, wooden post and lamps on wooden structure with stuffed rooster, 210.8 x 64.1 x 68.8 cm

So, about those gifts — one gift I’m carrying forward is permission—to work slowly, to trust that fragments don’t need to explain themselves right away. Shards know how to wait. They reveal their connections in time.

Another is attention, the soft, ongoing, background kind. The listening that notices how one piece leans toward another. How an image answers a question posed months ago. How intuition doesn’t hand us a map, but offers clues – “a secret handshake“.

I’m also carrying continuity. The understanding that the work doesn’t reset on January 1st. We bring our fragments with us—unfinished ideas, saved scraps, half-formed thoughts—and the new year simply offers a fresh surface on which to assemble them. It also gives us a grounded connection to where we have been.

Santa Nina, Encaustic Collage, Lyn Belisle, 2025

And finally, companionship. The knowledge that we never gather shards alone. We are guided by shared histories of making, by other artists (like Rauschenberg) working in the past or in parallel, by unseen hands that have always known how to build meaning from pieces.

  • Permission
  • Attention
  • Continuity
  • Companionship

If there is a gift in these words, it’s this: a reminder that you don’t need to arrive whole to begin the year. Thank goodness! What you carry—your fragments, saved pieces, unfinished ideas, and intuitive longings—is already enough. My hope is that you’ll treat them with the same care we give to cherished shards in the studio, trusting that when the time is right, they will find their place and become something new.

Thanks for your presence, thanks for giving me attention and companionship, and for meeting these thoughts with the intelligence and generosity that only the best readers bring. Happy Holidays!

Teacups: Finding a Personal Voice Inside a Shared Theme

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When artists are invited to participate in a themed exhibition, the first response is often analytical: What is the prompt asking for? But the more meaningful question comes later, and more quietly: What does this theme stir in me? This is where artists stop illustrating ideas and begin translating lived experience into form.

The exhibition One in Eight / The Teacup Project offered a clear conceptual framework. Conceived by GAGA Founder and exhibition designer Sylvia Benitez, herself a breast cancer survivor, the project is grounded not only in art history but in lived experience. The result is not a single visual narrative, but a chorus of distinct voices, each speaking without explanation, yet clearly understood.

Artists were asked to interpret a teacup and saucer in response to breast cancer awareness. The idea draws inspiration from Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup—an ordinary domestic object transformed into something charged, unsettling, and unforgettable, and notably the first artwork by a woman acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. (Take this link to read the full story – it’s a good one.)

Those were the verbal guidelines. Everything else had to be discovered through looking, listening, and making. That combination has given artists permission to respond intuitively and honestly, whether through symbolic imagery, altered objects, or direct material references.

The challenge is not to illustrate the theme literally, but to recognize which images insist on being made. Some become two-dimension, some three-dimensional. Some are still unfinished.

Teacup Interpretations in progress

For my piece, Held, the teacup became a container—not simply an object, but a state of being.

A woman’s face rests inside the cup, eyes closed, suspended between vulnerability and protection. The numbers one through eight circle the surface, not as a statistic to be explained, but as a persistent presence. They hover and repeat, blurred enough to resist certainty, yet impossible to ignore.

Rather than making a declarative statement about breast cancer, I wanted to explore what it must feel like to live with that knowledge—to carry it privately, bodily, and emotionally.

Encaustic was essential to this expression. Wax softens edges and obscures clarity. It allows images to hover in ambiguity, much like difficult truths themselves. Layers veil and reveal, holding space for complexity rather than resolution. The medium became part of the meaning. Even though I work often in three-dimensional assemblage, this felt right to me.

Material choice plays a powerful role in how artists interpret a shared theme. While I approached the teacup symbolically and atmospherically, other artists responded through direct engagement with the object itself. A real teacup carries familiarity and ritual. It is something we cradle in our hands, associated with warmth, pause, and care. When altered or recontextualized, that comfort can shift into something unsettling.

My friend Barbara took this idea one step further by placing a bra cup on a saucer. The gesture is immediate and unmistakable, collapsing metaphor and reality into a single form. The bra cup echoes the shape of the teacup while bringing the body directly into the conversation. Domestic object and intimate garment meet at the same scale, requiring no explanation. The meaning arrives visually, intuitively, and fully – and fluffy!

This is where non-verbal interpretation shows its strength. One artist may work symbolically, another literally. One may veil meaning in layers and atmosphere; another may present it plainly and directly. Neither approach is more valid than the other. Each is shaped by the artist’s relationship to the subject, their materials, and their personal history. What unites these responses is attentiveness—to the theme, to the body, and to the quiet knowledge we carry as women, caregivers, friends, and witnesses.

One in Eight / The Teacup Project is still in its development stage as a site exhibit, but the depth and immediacy of the responses so far suggest that it is already doing what meaningful exhibitions do best—opening space for reflection, connection, and shared understanding.  When an idea invites this level of engagement before it even takes physical form, it feels less like a proposal and more like an inevitability—one that will, no doubt, soon become a lived and visible exhibition.

In the meantime, you can see the virtual exhibition on the GAGA website on December 29. Brava to Sylvia for inspiring us to find our personal voices inside this truly interesting shared theme! 

Fragments, Forms and Layers: Part Three

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Part 3: Layered Images — The Original Language in My Practice

A three-part series on Fragments, Vessels & Layers
(Part Three: Layered Images)

Series Introduction

Recently, the artist and teacher Crystal Marie Neubauer invited me to talk with her online group about my work. It was an honor — Crystal’s influence on my creative life goes back years — but it also presented a surprising challenge. How do you describe an art practice that moves through so many materials and forms? Encaustic, collage, fiber, clay, found objects… I’ve never been a one-medium artist, and trying to explain everything at once felt impossible.

Then I realized that my work isn’t united by medium at all. It’s united by object and intention — by the three forms that keep reappearing no matter what I’m making.
And when I stepped back, those paths became clear:

  • Santos & Shards — guardians, icons, and the stories held in fragments

  • Vessels — boats, bowls, pods, and the metaphor of holding

  • Layered Images — collage, wax, and the  revelations inside translucence

These three paths intertwine across everything I do. And this series grows out of that realization — an invitation to look closely at where my work comes from and how meaning travels across forms.

Today’s final post in this series returns to the oldest language in my practice: layered collage.

Layered Images — The Core and Heart of My Work

Before my Santos emerged, before I began building boats and pods and sheltering forms, I was working in layers — paper, pigment, image, and – more recently – wax. Collage was my first real artistic home on the flat surface, and it remains the place I return to whenever I need to rediscover what I’m trying to say.

If Shards & Santos are about what we mend, and Vessels are about what we hold, then Layered Images are about what we choose to reveal — and what we allow to remain veiled. I’ve always worked in collage and for the last 15 year I’ve concentrated on encaustic layering thanks to my dear friend Michelle Belto who introduced me to the medium.

Why does Wax play so well with collage? Because It behaves Like Memory

Encaustic wax feels like the perfect collaborator because it mirrors the way memory works:

  • luminous in some places

  • fogged or obscured in others

  • layered with traces of earlier thoughts

  • holding what came before, even as new layers are added

Wax isn’t just a sealant or surface — it’s a way of thinking. It slows everything down. It requires heat, patience, and attention. It asks: Are you sure you want this visible? Are you sure you want that hidden?

I don’t use much colored wax at all – I’m not an “encaustic painter,” rather an artist who uses encaustic techniques to tell mixed-media stories. The pale translucency of beeswax is my go-to collage medium of choice.

A Layered Image Is a Conversation

When I work in collage and wax, I’m not composing an image; I’m listening to it. Layer by layer, the piece begins to speak –a scrap of ledger paper peeks through, a synthographic figure emerges or dissolves, an accidental texture becomes the thing the piece needed all along. Even removal becomes part of the conversation. Scraping back a surface to reveal earlier marks often leads me to meanings I didn’t anticipate. Encaustic is not a linear process. It loops. It reveals. It forgets and remembers.
Just like we do.

A Return to Old / A Portal to New

What I love most is that this old, familiar collage path has become a bridge to my newest work with synthographic imagery. The dream-logic of AI images blends beautifully with the ancient, tactile behavior of wax. One creates possibility; the other brings it to earth. If you’ve taken my recent Painting with Fire Lesson, Synthography and Wax, you understand.

The two together create a layered world where fantasy becomes grounded, realism becomes dreamlike, and the viewer is invited inside the luminous in-between

It feels like a collaboration across centuries — digital imagination meeting an art form older than painting itself. These aren’t just surfaces — they are strata.

Inviting You Into the Layers

Even if you don’t work in collage or encaustic, layering is a language almost every artist speaks. It’s about building meaning slowly, letting some things rest beneath the surface, allowing others to shine through.

Layers give us permission to be complex. To hold contradictions. To let time become part of the piece. As an example, here is a new (almost done but not yet – the edges are still taped) series that goes with my Encanto assemblages and will be in the Taos Exhibit in 2026.

I’m creating four layered encaustic collages, 20″x20″, each representing a child saint or Santo Niño. Technically, some are probably female Santas, but gender is not an issue here. Fusion is, fusion of layers and culture.

These Santo Niños inhabit the liminal space where Indigenous cosmologies and European Catholic iconography meet, overlap, and transform one another. The white-painted faces echo ritual marking found across Native traditions, signaling spiritual passage, ancestral presence, and worlds in transition. Their frames and gold-leaf halos recall Spanish devotional art, yet the children themselves do not belong fully to that lineage.

They are hybrid beings—part saint, part spirit-guardian—born of a cultural collision that reshaped the sacred landscape of the Southwest. 

I’ve layered mulberry paper printed with carpet designs and birds than might be found in a European drawing room with white painted synthographic faces of anonymous children to create contradictions and layers of metaphor and storytelling. Here they are so far – they may end up with one more layer of meaning but I’m just not sure:

Santo Niño of the Antlers and the Hidden Path

Santo Niño of the Sacred Heart Seed

Santo Niño of the Two Doves

Santo Niño of the Watching Birds

There is more color in these layered pieces (surprise!), but the printed color is pushed back by the veiling layers of wax, almost as if time-faded. I’m having an amazing time fitting the images to the layers of history and meaning in the whole concept of Encantos and objects of hope and devotion in a world where such things need to be extracted again from our deep sense of humanity.

Whew! That was  lot to talk about!

Here are a few prompts to bring into your own studio:

  • What early layer in your work deserves to resurface?

  • What do you want to soften — not erase — with a new layer?

  • How might your materials become translucent instead of opaque?

  • Is there an image in your practice that wants to hide and reveal itself at the same time?

Closing the Trilogy

With this third post — fragments, vessels, layers — the series comes full circle. Each path has shaped my work in different ways, but together they form a single through-line:

We create meaning from what we mend, what we hold, and what we choose to reveal.

Thank you for walking with me through all three.

Fragments, Forms & Layers: Part Two

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Last week, the remarkable artist and teacher Crystal Marie Neubauer invited me to speak with her online community about my work — an honor, and also an unexpected challenge. How do you describe an art practice that moves fluidly through so many materials? Encaustic, collage, clay, fiber, found objects… it’s never been about one medium.

What I realized is that my work is held together not by technique but by form and intention. Three recurring paths kept surfacing:

Santos & Shards — guardians, icons, and the stories held in fragments
Vessels — boats, bowls, pods, and the metaphor of holding
Layered Images — collage, wax, and the quiet revelations inside transparency

These forms thread through everything I make and shape how I think about narrative, memory, devotion, and protection. This three-part series grew from that conversation with Crystal’s group — an invitation to look more closely at how these paths emerge and how others might recognize echoes of their own practice along the way.

Part 2: Vessels of Holding — Forms That Carry Memory

A three-part series on Fragments, Vessels & Layers

In PART ONE, we talked about shards and stories and fragments.

If fragments are the invitations, vessels are the responses — the forms we create when we need to hold something gently, carry something forward, or protect something fragile. In my work, vessels have always been metaphors for care: what we shelter, what we offer, what we carry alone, and what we carry together.

This part of the series turns to the second creative path in my practice, one shaped deeply by my time teaching Spirit Vessels & Boats in Ireland. That workshop showed me how universally we understand the language of vessels — not just as objects, but as personal metaphors.

NOTE: If you read to the bottom of the post, there is some information about a new in-person Vessels workshop coming up in February.

Vessels as Small Architectures for Memory

A vessel is more than a container. It’s a small architecture — a structure built from tenderness and intention.

In my own studio, I return again and again to:

  • cane lashed into curved frames,

  • mulberry paper toughened with wax,

  • bits of rusted metal becoming anchors,

  • fiber and thread creating protection or boundary.

Each material changes the meaning of what the vessel carries. Wax, especially, offers a luminous kind of shelter — the sense that something is being preserved inside layers of translucence.

Teaching in Ireland: A Workshop of Passage and Light

When I taught this work in Mulranny, surrounded by sea light, tidal flats, and the slow breathing of the bay, my students immediately understood that they were making more than objects. They were making carriers — of memory, metaphor, hope, grief, gratitude.

Their vessels took on astonishing variety:

  • Some resembled wind-bent boats, as if carrying stories across an invisible tide.

  • Some were seed-like pods holding untold wishes.

  • Some were protective containers woven from cane, stitched paper, and beeswax, glowing like small lanterns.

There was a shared sense that these forms — however small — were honoring something beyond themselves.

Interior Space / Exterior Form

One of the most compelling conversations in the workshop was about the relationship between:

  • the space inside the vessel,

  • the form surrounding it,

  • and the meaning created by the tension between the two.

In a vessel, the interior always matters. It holds the intention. The exterior only reveals part of the story — the rest is protected within. This interplay mirrors how we move through the world: showing some things, guarding others, and trusting the container to hold what words cannot.

_________________________________________

Speaking of words, I am teaching a new two-day in-person Vessel workshop next year on Valentines Day weekend at UTSA/SW. It’s called Vessel Alchemy: Tactile
Poems in Fiber , Paper , Word, Light. Here’s a partial description from the catalog:

“In this immersive workshop, we’ll explore how simple
materials (sticks, cheesecloth, mulberry paper, fiber scraps,
ink) can be transformed into vessels that speak to memory,
meaning, and the ephemeral. Each day invites an unfolding
of form and story as we sculpt, wrap, write, embed, and
embellish.”

We’ll be doing some writing – words and poems and asemic mark making – here is a beautiful example from my friend Jean Dahlgren, who will be my TA for this class.

I love Jean’s asemic writing – she’s promised to write some lines on tissue paper for us to use in the workshop!

Workshop Registration for Friends of the School opens today, and it opens to the public on December 9th. I’d love to see you there!

If you can’t make it to the in-person workshop in February, you are welcome to checkout my online workshop called Spirit & Form: Creating Vessels of Passage and Purpose.

Here is a link to a sample lesson and the registration information. It’s self-paced and only $59 for lifetime access.

Inviting You Into the Studio: What Are You Carrying?

Even if you’ve never lashed cane or dipped mulberry paper into wax, you’ve likely made vessels in your own way — forms that hold meaning.

So here are some studio invitations for your own practice:

  • Could a boat, bowl, pod, or wrapped bundle be a metaphor waiting to be explored?

  • What would a “protective container” look like in your materials?

  • What happens when you build a structure around an emotion, a memory, or a small sacred object?

  • What materials in your studio feel inherently protective — wax, fiber, metal, clay?

A vessel doesn’t need to be functional to be truthful. It can simply be a place where meaning rests.

Looking Ahead

Next week, in Part Three, I’ll explore the last of the three intertwined paths: Layered Images — how veiled surfaces, hidden elements, and translucent strata reveal what is usually unseen.