About THE ARTIST

Beth Bobbitt is an encaustic artist whose work explores the relationship between art, nature, and human well‑being. Working with beeswax, pigment, and resin, she creates layered “waxscapes” that investigate the tension between real and built worlds and reflect the healing potential of creative practice. Beth has painted since childhood and discovered encaustics a decade ago during a workshop at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. The medium’s physicality became a natural extension of her lifelong interest in storytelling, transformation, and the landscapes we inhabit.

Her art practice deepened during the pandemic, when she moved to the woods and built a dedicated studio space. What began as a refuge became a steady, intentional practice that now sits at the center of her creative life. Beth spent more than twenty years in communications roles across museums, nonprofits, and wellness organizations, and her work in those fields was rooted in the same impulses that drive her art: shaping narratives, amplifying creativity, and building spaces for connection. Art has been a constant, sometimes foregrounded, sometimes running alongside her professional career, but always present.

In 2024 Beth stepped away from her full-time career to center her art and health. In 2025, Beth delivered a TEDx talk onThe Art of Healing, which explores how to connect with art as a source of vitality. Blending science, reflection, and her own artistic journey, Beth shares tools for pausing, checking in, and creating with intention in a world that glorifies hustle and productivity over passion and purpose.

Beth has a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts and a Master’s in Media Communications. Her work has been acquired by collectors all over the country including Square, (payment app), as part of their corporate collection and Washington Regional Medical Center, and Homegrown Restaurant. In 2026, Beth was chose for the juried exhibition, Common Ground, Fort Smith Regional Art Museum, Women of the Ozarks Digital Collection, Things We Don’t Say Out Loud Exhibition at 211 South Gallery and the First National Bank Exhibition. In 2025, she was featured in a two-person exhibition at Mount Sequoyah Gallery in Fayetteville, was one of the artist in the MAKR Studio Artist Showcase & Speaker Series, featured in Natural State, a Femme Forward collective exhibition at Local Color Studio Gallery. In 2024, she was selected in the juried exhibition, LUSH at Midnight Gallery and was a part of an international exhibition, Canadian Encaustic Conference, Near and Far. In 2023, her encaustic works were included in a juried exhibition at Walton Arts Center’s exhibition, Our Art, Our Region, Our Time and in 2022, she was a featured artist at Arkansas Public Theatre at the Victory in Rogers, Arkansas. Beth’s work can currently be found at The Gallery in downtown Bentonville, Arkansas.

Artist Statement:

My practice investigates the relationship between art, nature, and human well‑being, asking how material, process, and environment shape our capacity to heal, communicate, and imagine a better world. Working in encaustic, an ancient medium of beeswax, pigment, and tree resin, I build layered landscapes that echo natural ways of accumulation, erosion, and renewal. The physicality of melting, carving, building up, and scraping away layers of wax mirrors cycles of investigation, expression, and transformation—an ongoing dialogue between material, body, and environment.

Organic materials anchor my work in the physical world, while bright color, gold leaf, and embedded text and symbols evoke mythic narratives of joy, equity, and belonging. I aim to create spaces where viewers can slow down, feel texture as meaning, and reconnect with their own place in a shifting ecological and emotional landscape. After decades of telling others’ stories, I’ve found my own voice through my art practice—still storytelling, now in wax, echoing the poet, Mary Oliver’s charge: “Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”