These retreats offer time and space to deepen your practice through place, material, and process. Each retreat is rooted in a distinct landscape, inviting a slower, more intuitive way of working.
There we are! Mesmerized, inspired, frustrated, annoyed, delighted, determined!
We created, destroyed, built up, scraped back, swore, exclaimed, torched, painted, sighed, and all of it was incredibly exciting and delightful.
The energy of each of us at work was palpable and invigorating. My heart is full and I’m grateful for you.
Joan, Art retreat participant, 2026
Encaustic retreat: Luminous Terrain, distilling the Irish Lanscape in Encaustic
12th–19th October 2026 — A week long retreat in Mulranny, county Mayo-limited availability-only 1 space left !
Luminous Terrain is a week-long encaustic art retreat in the wild, inspiring landscape of Mulranny, Co. Mayo. Guided by artist Isabelle Gaborit, participants translate the Irish landscape—its light, textures, and forms—into luminous, tactile encaustic artworks. Combining outdoor excursions across bogs, cliffs, and tidal zones with studio practice, the retreat explores layered techniques, intuitive mark-making, and the transformation of sensory impressions into abstract art inspired by place and experience.
👉 For more details or to reserve your space, follow this link
4 days Encaustic Workshop: Layers of Light: Distilling the Landscape through Light & Form
15th–18th April 2027 — An immersive four-day workshop in Kunstfreiraum studio, Basel, Switzerland ( REGISTRATION NOW OPEN )
An immersive four-day encaustic workshop at Kunstfreiraum Studio, Basel, Switzerland, exploring expressive approaches to landscape through wax. Guided by Isabelle Gaborit, participants move beyond representation to translate light, atmosphere, memory, and place into luminous, layered paintings. Through demonstrations, experimental techniques, and intuitive mark-making, you’ll discover how transparent and opaque encaustic layers create depth and resonance. Drawing inspiration from both art history and personal observation, this workshop offers a supportive space to develop a more expressive and individual visual language.
👉 For more details or to reserve your space, follow this link
Encaustic retreat in Southern France: Luminous Terrain, Distilling Landscape in Encaustic
3rd–10th May 2027 — A week long retreat in BeArtz, Sauveterre-de-Béarn, Southwest France ( REGISTRATION NOW OPEN )
Join me for my immersive week-long retreat in France, Luminous Terrain: Distilling Landscape in Encaustic, at BéArtz in the medieval village of Sauveterre-de-Béarn.
Together, we’ll explore how landscape can become a starting point for abstraction—not something to reproduce, but something to observe, distil and transform through gesture, texture, light, atmosphere and mark-making. The river, ancient stone, shifting light and distant Pyrenean horizons will provide rich material for creative exploration.
Each day, I’ll guide you through observation, drawing, visual gathering and studio practice, developing your sketches and impressions into layered encaustic paintings. We’ll work with translucency, texture, carving, scraping and heat, allowing the processes of the wax to echo the layers, traces and transformations of the landscape itself.
Open to all levels, the retreat combines demonstrations, individual guidance, experimentation and plenty of time to develop your own work and visual language.
We’ll stay for seven nights in BéArtz’s historic house, with comfortable private rooms, shared meals, studio facilities and an excursion to Espelette and its caves. Arrival is via Biarritz Airport, with regular flights from Ireland and the U.S.
👉 For more details or to reserve your space, follow this link Luminous Terrain, Distilling Landscape in Encaustic
Abstracting the Landscape: From Observation to Material and Memory
7th–9th June 2027- An immersive three-day post conference workshop in Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, Truro, MA, part of the International Encaustic Conference (REGISTRATION OPENS SOON)
Join me once again in beautiful Cape Cod for the 20th anniversary of the illustrious International Encaustic Conference and a three-day workshop exploring how we can move from looking at a landscape to creating a painting that expresses our experience of it.
Using observation, photographic reference, memory, colour, gesture, and material, we’ll explore landscape as a starting point for abstraction. Rather than reproducing what we see, we’ll learn to distil a landscape into essential shapes, values, rhythms, and directional forces, then rebuild and transform them through painting.
Across three days, we’ll move from seeing and reducing, to building and disrupting, and finally to deconstructing, editing, and developing a personal response. Through demonstrations, exercises, individual guidance, and discussion, we’ll explore notan, underpainting, layering, colour, mark-making, texture, and additive and subtractive processes.
The focus is not on reproducing a particular place, but on discovering how painting can communicate its atmosphere, memory, movement, and physical presence.
Open to all levels, this workshop invites you to loosen your dependence on photographic representation, experiment, and develop a more intuitive and personal relationship with landscape and the painting process.
👉 For more details or to reserve your space, follow this link
