Stormy Day

Encaustic , 12 x 16 x 1, 2022

I am a salvage artist. There’s a deep connection I feel to the past, the beauty and the decay. My style, my aesthetic, is much like a historian or archaeologist, to preserve what I unearth.

I use encaustic to explore the space where landscape becomes memory—where abstraction and realism overlap. Working with quiet earth tones, I respond to place not as a fixed view, but as something felt and remembered. The material itself carries a sense of history, allowing the surface to hold marks, erosion, and quiet shifts.

Colleen is a Seattle-based artist working with found and salvaged vintage and antique materials for assemblage and collage art as well as encaustic painting.
She balances her work between her home studio in Magnolia and her studio at Fogue Studios and Gallery in the Georgetown neighborhood where she teaches encaustic painting.