Pamela Letona stares at life with the fearless eyes of a warrior. Diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease at the age of thirty, she suffers intense pain in the spine on a daily basis; a pain which only art and the lush nature surrounding her Honduran finca can alleviate. After years of creative exploration, during which she devoted herself to her interior design career, she found her true identity in encaustic painting, a centuries-old technique involving the use of beeswax and resin as painting mediums. With a torch she carefully molds the liquefied material on a wood panel, creating her designs by adding pigments and transferring images and other elements onto the surface. A final layer of colored shellac - a resinous substance made from the secretion of the lac insect - conveys further dynamism to her pieces. Letona portrays the whole range of human emotions: couples passionately kissing or locked in a tender embrace; lonely figures crouched in despair, their limbs contorted in pain; floating bodies shrouded in a cocoon, carving a space of quiet amidst the chaos of their existence. Overall, however, Letona’s work is celebratory, exalting resilience, strength, love, and the beauty of the human experience.

In her native Honduras, Letona is regarded as a pioneer of encaustic painting and one of the leading figures on the local artistic scene. Letona studied Decorative Arts at Universidad Católica in Honduras and spent over a decade working as an interior designer. She exhibited in Latin and Central America as well as Houston, Texas, and Paris, most notably the Museo Para La Identidad Nacional, in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. She is the founder of ALGalería, an online gallery promoting the work of Honduran artists, and MujeresHartes, a platform where female artists and performers can safely interact and collaborate.