Lisa Cirenza
About Lisa
Lisa Cirenza is an artist and educator whose work explores what lies beneath the surface. In a culture shaped by quick impressions and thirty-second assessments, her practice deliberately slows time, focusing on depth, accumulation, and the quiet complexity that emerges through layers.
With a degree in earth science, Lisa approaches both art and life geologically. Her work is built through repeated acts of adding and subtracting—layering, fusion, erosion, and partial uncovering—reflecting the way memory, experience, and landscapes form and transform over time. These ideas make encaustic a natural medium for her practice, where wax can be built, excavated, and reworked to reveal a visual history beneath the surface.
A devoted materials enthusiast, Lisa brings together knowledge of minerals, pigments, the physics of light, the biology of color perception, and physical chemistry. Before focusing primarily on encaustic, Lisa developed an international reputation as a digital artist. She received Adobe’s Top Digital Artist Award at the Salon d’Automne in Paris and has taught digital art globally for both Apple and Adobe, including performing live on the giant screen at Apple’s flagship store in San Francisco. Her experience with digital tools continues to inform her approach to composition, layering, and visual experimentation. In her encaustic work she often integrates painted foundations, digital foundations, rice papers inspired by her time living and studying in Japan, and materials such as raw pigments, graphite, and other surprises. Wax’s luminosity and responsiveness to heat and gravity make it an active collaborator—one that resists total control and mirrors the unpredictable processes found in nature.
Lisa’s artistic foundation includes intensive study at the Royal Drawing School in London, ateliers in Paris, New York, and Tokyo. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Miami Art Basel, the Venice Biennale, the Grand Palais and Louvre in Paris, and the Asian Biennale in Bangladesh, as well as in museums and institutions across the United States, Europe, and Asia.
For more than twenty years Lisa has taught art and creative thinking privately and for institutions including Ecole Superior de Commerce Paris, Christopher Newport University, Stanford University, Tikehau Capital, and Barclays. In her teaching she emphasizes the creative process, finding your unique voice, materials awareness, archival practices, and a thoughtful balance between experimentation and intention. Whether working in wax or on the iPad, she guides artists to think deeply about layering, mark-making, and the evolving relationship between materials, process, and their why.
You can view Lisa’s work at:
www.cirenza.com
www.facebook.com/LisaCirenzaFineArt
www.instagram.com/art.lc
Class Details
Geology of a Painting: Layering, Embedding, and Excavating in Encaustic
Lisa approaches encaustic painting the way an earth scientist reads the earth — as a record of layers, pressure, and transformation over time revealed through fissures and surface erosion.
In this one-hour session, Lisa will explore encaustic as a medium of both addition and subtraction, revealing how complex surfaces emerge through layering, embedding, and excavation. Drawing on her background in geology, traditional oil painting, and time in Japan spent studying rice papers and calligraphy, she brings together an unusual range of materials and approaches.
Lisa will demonstrate how she often begins with a painted foundation before building layers of wax, incorporating elements such as calligraphic inks, rice papers, raw pigments, graphite, and some surprises. She will also discuss how certain materials can affect the behavior of the wax as it cools, and the principles of the physics of light in her choice of materials.
Rather than focusing on rigid steps, this session will introduce a way of thinking about encaustic as a living stratigraphy of materials, where each layer interacts with heat, pressure, and time.
Artists curious about expanding their material vocabulary and pushing encaustic beyond traditional approaches will leave with new ideas for experimentation and surface development.
Designing Layers: What Digital Art Can Teach Encaustic Painters
Ideas for complex paintings often begin long before materials are applied to the surface.
In this short session, artist Lisa Cirenza will introduce the fundamentals of creating artwork on the iPad and how digital tools can be used to explore composition, color, and layered imagery before moving into physical media. Known for her richly layered encaustic paintings, Lisa approaches digital art with the same mindset she brings to wax: building, revising, and excavating visual layers.
Using the iPad drawing app Procreate, Lisa will demonstrate how artists can use layers, transparency, and digital brushes to quickly experiment with ideas and develop compositions. She will also share how digital studies can evolve into encaustic works that incorporate painted foundations, calligraphic rice paper, pastel pigments, and metal leaf.
This session offers a simple introduction to iPad painting while showing how digital tools can become a powerful sketching and design environment for mixed-media artists working in encaustic and beyond.
