Estrella Encinias

Estrella Encinias is just in her early 20s with a newminted BFA in painting from New Mexico Highlands University. But it’s already abundantly clear that she is an artist. She already carries a rich trove of influences and experiences to draw from in making art, including a musical father and a mother who liked to take things apart and put them back together to see how they worked.

Because her father was a park ranger, Encinias grew up in beautiful Villanueva State Park, southwest of Las Vegas, where the cottonwood-lined Pecos River winds beneath sandstone cliffs. Her young life was full of animals—softshell turtles and fish in the river, snakes, and the family’s dogs. The small Spanish Colonial village of Villanueva was just up the road and the park provided places to gather for extended family and friends, with New Mexican food and local musicians.

At college in Las Vegas, Encinias had strong support from the Highlands art faculty and generous studio space with a virtual candy box of materials. She tried them all: painting in oils, acrylics, and watercolor; ceramics; sculpture; jewelry-making; and printmaking in woodblock, etching, and lithography. For now, with a small artmaking space in her Las Vegas home, she focuses on painting. But her ideal studio: “Oh my gosh,” she says. “It would be big enough to work in all mediums.”

Animals have made their way into Encinias’s art, including Asian-influenced woodblock prints of koi fish featured in the 2020 Highlands University virtual art exhibition, Between the Lights. More recently, her large-scale oil portrait, I’ll Always Love You, was featured in the 9th Annual New Mexico Painters’ Exhibition at Highlands. The classically posed young man holding out a flower reflects her use of paint to express emotion. He is “sad because he’s heartbroken,” the artist says. “Men don’t always express. They just go it alone. This is in support and love for men out there who are struggling.”

Warm and thoughtful, Encinias sparkles with the excitement of being at the beginning of her artistic career with multiple potential directions ahead. She enjoys working quickly in acrylics to jumpstart ideas, switching to oils for the final painting.

Lately she has been exploring surrealism for conveying difficult-to-communicate experiences—like the pressure of ocular migraines depicted as eyes floating in a fishbowl. Still, most of her art suggests joy through nature imagery and vibrant colors. And she finds relaxation in the artmaking itself. “My expression just flows out through my fingertips and straight onto the medium,” she says, adding, “I just want to try it all.” R