Marilyn Banner is an American fine artist widely recognized for her evocative encaustic paintings and mixed-media sculptures. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, her decades-long practice integrates natural landscapes with deeply personal explorations of psychology, memory, and spirituality.

Artistic Mediums & Style

• Encaustic Paint: Since 2004, she has worked almost exclusively with encaustic, a meticulous process utilizing a heated mixture of beeswax, pigment, and resin fused onto wood panels.

• Diary-Like Drawings: Her recent works include intimate, small-scale drawings on raw canvas using Micron pens, ink, walnut washes, and conte crayons.

• Tactile Materials: Over her career, she has incorporated diverse materials like plaster, fur, bones, metals, bricks, and shells to ground her themes in physical texture.

Core Themes & Influences

• Nature & Landscape: A pivotal trip to Costa Rica in 2002 shifted her emphasis away from purely psychological subjects toward the natural landscape and environmental themes.

• The Unconscious: Her earlier creations were heavily influenced by Jungian psychology, dreams, feminism, and Jewish ancestry. In the late 1980s, she notably welded large steel Hebrew letters inspired by Kabbalistic mysticism to explore the unconscious mind.

Career & Education

• Background: She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) from Washington University in St. Louis and a Master of Science in Education (MSEd) / Master's degree from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.

• Affiliations: Banner is a long-standing member of the Ceres Gallery in New York City. She has also played key roles in Betsy Damon's No Limits for Women in the Arts project, the National Women's Caucus for Art, and the Washington D.C. area music and art initiative, Washington Musica Viva.