The Artist

Dominique Gustin is a multi-disciplinary artist working across photography, digital and mixed media, encaustic painting, poetry, contemporary collage, video and sound.  She created SomnMigratory Studio to share her contemporary digital collage and encaustic paintings. Dominique studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has been making art and working in the arts for over thirty years. She lives in St. Johnsbury, Vermont.

The Work - Contemporary Digital Collage & Encaustic Painting

Dominique’s work is rooted in mixed-media collage traditions and postmodern art, drawing on the symbolic storytelling of magical realism and a playful, whimsical touch. Birds thinking, bees working, and cats daydreaming—quiet myths and imagined narratives brought to life through encaustic beeswax, damar tree resin, and pigment.

Her process 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 shaping a unique composition that reflects the tone and story of the work.

The final image is printed with archival pigment ink, mounted to a wood panel, and further developed with 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 invite the viewer to look closer.

While digital tools spark the early stages of each work, every painting is wholly handmade—shaped by touch, intuition, and attention to detail - balancing encaustic’s smooth, luminous surface with texture, incised lines, reflection and shadow.