Page 59 - Enso Circle Catalog September 2021

About BOTTOM LEFT

the MICHELLE BELTO NEXT DOOR NEIGHBORHOOD 16X6X16”
WOOD, WIRE, ENCAUSTIC, FOUND
PHOTOS
Artist Most artists will tell you that some of their earliest memories are wrapped TOP RIGHT

TERRA INCOGNITA 14 X 11X 4” ENCAUSTIC
ON PAPER
up in something creative. As a voracious reader I developed a storyteller’s
imagination which drew me to the stage. When I was nine, I was given the BOTTOM RIGHT
lead in our all-school annual play. It was more than magical to be a character NEXT DOOR NEIGHBORHOOD (DETAIL)
in a life-sized story. I was hooked!

For the next twenty-five years I was involved with every aspect of educational
and professional theater including a three-year adventure transforming an
abandoned 1890 vaudeville opera house into a thriving community theater. My
work took a dramatic shift into visual art in the early 1990’s while working on a
solo show I had written, Hildegard of Bingen. I woke up from a dream with the
thought that I needed to paint. So, I did.

What emerged from following that year-long intuitive journey of painting and
writing the play is a series of five large paintings on paper that told me my
own story. That year took me from stage to studio and effectively changed the
direction of my career.

I am intrigued by the textures and shapes around me. I usually limit myself to
About a minimalist’s color palette choosing to let the richness of the beeswax and the

surface of the paper speak for itself. I often use organic materials such as rust
or the marks of a torch to inform the paper before I apply the wax. My themes
the tend toward the spiritual and my images still appear in dreams or flashes of

insight.
Work

My new body of work is a departure from the style and content of the
intimate stories told through vintage papers and wax that I have been creating
since 2017. This, the year of Covid, I have come face to face with my own
mortality, as we all have.

Each day I committed some time to listen to a story of someone who either
survived or were taken too soon. The resulting paintings and this altar are my
own imagined understanding of that thinnest of veils we call death.

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