Sista Luna is a Colorado visual artist, born and raised in a family of creatives, currently living in Lafayette. In 2010, she received her BA in Studio Art from Colorado College; exploring figure drawing, oil painting, lithography and stone carving. Her culminating thesis show, Transitional (in) Nature, featured large-scale conté drawings of liminal slot canyon spaces, examining how the inherent nature of all things is to change.
Luna continued drawing (mainly graphite portraits) with other projects in tandem, including acrylic painting, paper affirmation stars, and mixed-media works. In 2016, she began cultivating a new practice of alchemizing her old artwork as a medium to create new art - reflecting her inner death/rebirth cycles. By connecting with other artists through this work, she co-founded YBC, a nonprofit artist collective serving local creatives of Routt County, in 2017.
After serving on the YBC working board for four years, Luna chose to recalibrate her energy and focus primarily on her personal art career. This renewed focus, combined with the grief of her father’s death in 2021, funneled into a grounding, month-long, daily ink drawing challenge (Inktober) which expanded into a year-long, weekly prompted drawing practice throughout the entirety of 2022. This period of structured creation revealed strong themes of honoring mortality, grief in its many forms, and processing through death/rebirth cycles. All of which have carried into her current work in mixed media, figure drawing, artwork alchemy, and of course, the continuation of her now annual participation in Inktober every October.
I am a visual artist enamored with the alchemy of mark making. I play with a variety of mediums in my work, exploring death/rebirth cycles and creating space for transformation through honoring the truths in loss, mortality, and inevitable change. These thematic threads consistently weave throughout my artwork, while their physical manifestations can include drawing, painting, mixed media, sculpture, performance, and now, AI-generated imagery. Through the alchemy of using my old artwork as a medium in creating new art, I tend to the loss of old beliefs, patterns, and connections; giving myself grace to build from the ashes anew.
