Workshops 2026
Explore a year of immersive, creative workshops in Ireland, France and the US in 2026.
Guided by artist Isabelle Gaborit, these workshops invite you to slow down, observe, and engage deeply with landscape, material, and memory. Whether you are new to encaustic painting or an experienced artist seeking fresh inspiration, each workshop offers a supportive space to experiment, reflect, and create meaningful work.
Encaustic Immersion Workshops
A focused one-day introduction to encaustic painting, designed to build confidence with the medium while encouraging intuitive exploration. These workshops are ideal for beginners as well as artists wishing to deepen their relationship with wax, heat, and layered surfaces.
Encaustic Immersion Workshop
11th July 2026 — Galway City, Ireland NEW DATE ADDED!
Discover the unique tactile qualities of encaustic painting in this immersive day workshop. You’ll explore surface, translucency, and movement, learning how wax can hold gesture, memory, and emotion.
👉 For more details or to reserve your space, follow this link
Encaustic Immersion Workshop
12th July 2026 — Dublin City, Ireland NEW DATE ADDED!
A continuation of the Encaustic Immersion series, this workshop invites you to experiment freely while gaining a solid technical foundation. Expect playful exploration balanced with practical guidance.
👉 For more details or to reserve your space, follow this link
Layers of Light: Distilling the Landscape through Light & Form
23rd–24th May 2026 — Renvyle Bay, Ireland ( Limited availability )
Inspired by Connemara’s extraordinary light, this two-day workshop invites you to move beyond realism and create expressive landscape paintings rooted in atmosphere, memory, and mood.
Through sketches, intuitive studies, and guided painting sessions, you’ll learn to simplify and reimagine the landscape—focusing on essential shapes, rhythms, and forces. A key emphasis is placed on layering light, using transparent and opaque colour to build depth and luminosity.
Suitable for beginners and experienced painters alike, this workshop offers a nurturing space to loosen your approach and develop a more personal visual language.
👉 For more details or to reserve your space, follow this link
The Lay of the Land: Mapping Memories in Layers
1–3 June 2026 — Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, Truro, MA ( FULLY BOOKED/ click on link below to access waiting list)
Join me once again in beautiful Cape Cod for the 19th International Encaustic Conference and a three-day workshop devoted to exploring texture as both surface and story. Working with layered wax, we’ll investigate how ridges, valleys, translucency, and depth can carry memory, emotion, and lived experience.
We’ll begin with mark-making and surface exploration, gradually developing personal “terrains” inspired by natural forms—cliffs, shorelines, hills, and the shifting edges between land and water. Texture becomes a visual language for reflection, growth, and transformation, as we build and excavate our surfaces.
Open to all levels, this workshop offers a supportive introduction for beginners while inviting experienced artists to expand their technical approach and deepen the conceptual potential of their encaustic practice.
👉 For more details or to reserve your space, follow this link
The Lay of the Land: Mapping Memories in Layers
17th–19th July 2026 — Renvyle Bay, Ireland ( only 1 space left )
The Lay of the Land is a three-day encaustic workshop focused on texture as both surface and story. Through layered wax, you’ll explore how ridges, valleys, translucency, and depth can hold memory, emotion, and lived experience.
Beginning with mark-making and surface exploration, you’ll develop personal “terrains” inspired by natural forms—cliffs, shorelines, hills, and transitions between land and water. Texture becomes a language for reflection, growth, and transformation.
Open to all levels, this workshop offers beginners a welcoming introduction to encaustic while providing experienced artists with new conceptual and technical perspectives.
👉 For more details or to reserve your space, follow this link
Encaustic retreat in France: Embodied Landscape
14th–22nd Septembre 2026 — A week long retreat in BeArtz, Sauveterre-de-Béarn, Southwest France ( only one space left )
Join me for my immersive retreat in France, Embodied Landscape—a week-long exploration of abstraction through daily drawing, mark making, and encaustic painting, inspired by place, memory, and geological processes. Together, we’ll move beyond literal representation and respond to the landscape through sensation, gesture, texture, and atmosphere. The medieval architecture, river, shifting light, and vast Pyrenean horizons of BeArtz will act as catalysts for creative inquiry rather than subjects to copy.
Each day, I’ll guide you through on-site observation, intuitive sketching, and studio practice. Your drawings will become source material for layered encaustic works as we heat, fuse, scrape, and rework wax—echoing the slow transformations of the earth. This retreat is open to all levels; I offer clear, supportive guidance for beginners and encourage experienced artists to loosen habits and deepen their engagement with abstraction.
We’ll stay in a 1,000-year-old castle perched above a cliffside village, with private room options, most meals included, excursions, and abundant studio time. 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
Encaustic retreat: Luminous Terrain,distilling the Irish Lanscape in Encaustic
12th–19th October 2026 — A week long retreat in Mulranny, county Mayo
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