The Artist

Dominique Gustin is a multi-disciplinary artist working in photography, digital and mixed-media, encaustic, poetry, contemporary collage, video and sound.  She created SomnMigratory Studio to feature her contemporary digital collage and encaustic painting. Dominique attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has worked as an artist and arts professional for over thirty years. She currently resides in St. Johnsbury, Vermont with her family.

The Work - Contemporary Digital Collage & Encaustic Painting

Rooted in mixed-media collage traditions and postmodern art, Dominique’s work draws from the symbolic storytelling of magical realism—rendered with a sense of whimsy. Birds thinking, bees working, cats daydreaming: these narratives explore quiet myths and imagined sanctities in encaustic beeswax, damar tree resin and pigment.

Dominique blends contemporary digital collage with traditional, tactile media to create layered, narrative-rich encaustic paintings. Each piece begins with a visual daydream—something beautiful, impossible, absurd, emotionally resonant, or quietly political.

The foundation of each painting is a digital collage composed in Photoshop using fragments of photographs, licensed stock imagery, and AI-generated visuals. These elements—figures, landscapes, and objects—are cut, layered, and altered much like a traditional collage to craft a unique image that reflects the tone and story of the work.

The final composition is printed with archival pigment ink, mounted to a wood panel, and further developed through hand-applied media: watercolor, charcoal, pencil, oil pastel, and encaustic—a luminous blend of beeswax, damar resin, and pigment. Once cooled, the surface is carved and textured to reveal the image’s layered history and material depth.

Though digital tools support the early stages of each piece, every painting is wholly handmade—shaped by touch, intuition, and attention to surface.