Robyn McClendon
Artist - Artaeomythologist • Social Anthropologist • Mixed Media Alchemist

Hovering on the liminal edges of visual anthropology, Robyn McClendon is a rare bird—an artist whose work weaves together the unseen and the ancient. With over three decades as a Reiki Master trained in the Usui Shiki Ryoho method, she channels an intimate understanding of energy frequencies, vibrations, and sacred symbology into every facet of her creative practice. Her art is not simply to be viewed—it is to be experienced. It exists as a vessel for transformative transmission, engaging body, mind, and spirit in the same way ancestral symbol-based practices once did.

With active training in social anthropology, Robyn explores the language of symbols across societies, decoding the ways in which visual forms transmit meaning, identity, and memory. This devotion to meaning-making has shaped her unique methodology, which she calls Arteomythology—a lifelong practice of mythic storytelling through the visual arts.

Her process embraces distressed textures, collage, calligraphy, and experimental printmaking—especially gelli plate and eco-dyeing techniques—infused with intuitive mark-making and layered use of reclaimed ephemera. Robyn’s work reflects a reverence for the overlooked, the worn, and the time-touched: “We embrace the ordinary, rejected, and often less-than-perfect bits of life,” she says. “Our stories are born from these edges.”

As a founding voice in the Book as Art movement of the 1980s, Robyn helped re-establish the book form as a potent vehicle for visual storytelling. She was a core educator at the Corcoran School of Art and the Smithsonian Institution’s Resident Associate Program, where she pioneered foundational book arts curricula still echoed today.

Through her online studio school, Art Mythos, Patreon community, and her popular YouTube channel Robyn McClendon, she guides thousands of artists around the world in developing their visual vocabulary. Her courses focus on intuitive scripting, collage, mark making, and gel printing—techniques rooted in both ancient memory and personal transformation.

For Robyn, art is not a thing; it is a frequency. And to make art with her is to remember who you were before the world told you who to be.