Louise Despont is a New York-born artist who creates detailed, geometric drawings that explore spiritual and natural themes. She explores the ways in which the fabric of our material world is intrinsically interwoven with the forms and forces of the invisible world. Botanic, geologic, and animalic forms of sentience and understanding are at the center of her works. Born in 1983, she studied Art Semiotics at Brown University, graduating in 2006. She now lives and works in Mallorca, Spain.
Drawing Practice and Technique
Despont is known for creating intricate drawings using colored pencils, graphite, and architectural stencils. For over a decade, she worked primarily on antique ledger paper, layering her drawings over the original handwritten entries that remain visible beneath her work. A single large drawing can take up to 300 hours to complete. In recent years, she has shifted to working with collage—combining botanical illustrations, architectural lithographs, and marbled papers—then translating these onto antique canvas using layers of rubbed and sanded pigment.
Her process is methodical but not pre-planned. She begins by drawing one-inch grids across assembled ledger sheets laid on her studio floor, then allows forms to emerge organically from the gridded paper. She describes this as similar to gardening, where “the drawing guides itself and you’re there to do the weeding, and the watering, and the planting”. Some drawings develop quickly while others require months of reworking and revision.
Themes and Influences
Despont’s work draws from sacred geometry, mandala traditions, and esoteric symbolism. Her early drawings focused on polarity, vibration, pattern, sound, and healing practices including homeopathy. More recently, her work has centered on the hermetic principle of “as above, so below”—exploring how different states of consciousness and planes of existence connect and influence each other.
She considers drawing a form of research and meditation, a way to access information and create balance. The spirituality of her work was reinforced during her time living in Bali, Indonesia, where she moved in 2014. The island’s spiritual culture and natural environment deeply influenced her practice, leading her to collaborate with traditional Balinese kite makers on three-dimensional bamboo and string sculptures.
Artworks Featured: Louise Despont | Floras no. 28, 2025 & Floras no. 34, 2025 | Collage with antique book pages | 65 x 85 cm / 26 x 34 in (framed)
Correspondence Exhibition
Despont’s third solo exhibition with Galerie ISA in Mumbai, titled Correspondence, ran from September 11 to October 23, 2025. The show explored how the material and invisible worlds connect through plants, animals, minerals, stars, and ancestors. Works combined small collages on paper with large-scale drawings on antique canvas.
One key piece, The Sixth Sense, incorporated fragments from The Lady and the Unicorn, a series of 15th-century Flemish tapestries. The first five tapestries represent the traditional five senses, while the sixth represents knowledge beyond ordinary sensory experience. Throughout the exhibition, eyes appear embedded in plants and framed within vesica piscis shapes—the form created when two circles overlap, traditionally used to depict sacred moments.
Another work, Collective Consciousness, featured the Lion Capital of Ashoka, with its four lions facing the cardinal directions, representing a source from which understanding spreads. The exhibition invited viewers to connect with plant, mineral, and animal forms of consciousness.
Career Recognition
Her work is held in collections at MoMA, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the RISD Museum. She has received a Fulbright Fellowship, a Princess Grace Grant, and the 2017 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is represented by Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York and Galerie ISA in Mumbai.
Despont has exhibited extensively including at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, The Drawing Room in London, and institutions across Europe and India. Her practice continues to examine how hand-drawn marks can reveal connections between visible and invisible worlds, creating what she calls “vast and branching networks of understanding”
Cover iamge: Louise Despont | Other Forms of Consciousness, 2024 | Colored pencil on antique canvas | 198 x 184 cm / 79 x 74 in (framed)
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