GEORGE

Long before Kathryn Cirincione poured the first layer of wax onto this wooden panel in her Bolinas studio, the image of Saint George slaying the dragon had already traveled millennia — through Byzantine chapels, through the frescoed walls of Southern Italian churches where her ancestors mixed pigment by candlelight, through medieval embroideries and Orthodox icons carried across seas. She grew up with that inheritance quietly present, surfacing in the way she reads a story, the way she trusts a symbol to carry more than words ever could. In this encaustic, she reclaims that image and makes it breathe again. The saint sits erect, halo glowing white against a turbulent cerulean sky, spear tipped with a golden cross angled toward the writhing dragon below. The white horse is bold and unafraid, its red bridle a thread of blood-memory connecting the earthly and the sacred. The wax has pooled and crystallized at the borders, creating a frame that looks less like a painting's edge and more like the threshold of a reliquary — something you lean toward, something you feel the warmth of. This is Cirincione's great gift: she takes what is ancient and makes you feel it as if for the first time. Standing before this panel, you are simultaneously in a medieval church in Calabria, in a Bolinas studio filled with the smell of hot wax and sea air, and in the present moment, watching courage take form.