This winter, local resident and artist Liz Mersky burned hundreds of her own art works.

She had considered doing it several years ago, after looking at stacks and stacks of pastel drawings and paintings and resolving that there wasn’t much sense in keeping it all just for the sake of keeping it.

“I don’t like a lot of stuff,” Mersky told the News this month. “It seemed stupid that they were in drawers and nobody was seeing them.”

Mersky compiled a stack of work intended for burning, but friends — as did, admittedly, this reporter upon hearing the tale — reacted with shock, and Mersky relented, allowing the work to continue to sit in boxes.

When the notion came around again this winter, Mersky went ahead and lit the bonfire before telling anyone.

“That was the only way it was going to happen,” she said with a chuckle.

From what remains of Mersky’s works — around 250 pieces, she estimated — came the selected pieces that make up “Into the Light,” a small retrospective exhibition opening Thursday, July 2, in the YS Senior Center Fireplace Room. Landscapes, florals and other works will be on display, with proceeds from every piece set to be donated to a local nonprofit of the buyer’s choosing.

“I want them to be as much benefit as they can be,” Mersky said, and said suggested nonprofits include the Senior Center, Tecumseh Land Trust, World House Choir, The 365 Project and “Who’s Hungry?”, though buyers may make their own selection outside of that list.

The impulse to let the art leave her hands, and for the departure itself to be useful, is a fitting frame for a retrospective by an artist whose creative life has been marked by movement: from photography to documentary video, from pastels and paint to wood.

Mersky, a photographer from around the age of 6, came to Yellow Springs from Michigan as an Antioch College student, drawn to the school’s work-study program; she graduated in 1973, amid the Antioch strike. She left the village for a short stay in California, returning after about six months, and has lived here since then. After her return, she worked in Antioch’s video department with Bob Devine, and later transitioned into filmmaking.

For about 14 years, Mersky made documentaries focused on environmental issues and community life. Her films include “Sweetwater,” about the Little Miami River; “Room 19,” filmed in a Springfield classroom serving children with significant disabilities; and 1983’s acclaimed “Labor More than Once,” which chronicled a local mother’s struggle to regain her parental rights after coming out as a lesbian.

“I thought I was gonna change the world with my documentaries back then,” she said, adding that, at the time, she worked with reel-to-reel tape and heavy editing equipment.

“I’m sitting there cranking dials and splicing,” she said. “Everything was by hand — and I love that I learned that way.”

Around 1990, Mersky said, local resident and painter Julie Carlson asked to come to Mersky’s home outside Yellow Springs to draw the surrounding landscape. As Carlson painted the wide vista, Mersky filmed her — but as she watched her friend work, she found herself wanting to step out from behind the camera.

“I thought, ‘I want to do that — I don’t want to carry around this big, heavy camera anymore,’” she said.

Mersky had never taken an art class before, but she said Carlson gave her simple advice on how to get started: “You can just draw what you see.”

“And I took off, and I just loved it,” Mersky said.

Mersky said she took Carlson’s advice very much to heart, and learned by looking — really looking, sometimes closing one eye to study how a line might move from the three-dimensional world onto a flat surface.

“I’m not trained,” she said. “I just kind of wing it.”

Within months of beginning, she said, a friend encouraged her to mount a show; her first one adorned the walls of the Winds Cafe, where she would exhibit nearly every year for a decade or so, and other shows followed elsewhere in the village and state.

In the months and years that followed her first foray into drawing and painting, Mersky experimented with landscapes, then moved into flowers, buildings, imagined scenes and abstracts. At one point, she created a series of horses, standing over the canvas with a stirring stick dipped in house paint, letting it fall in looping tendrils to outline the equine form.

“You can’t stop it,” she said. “You’re just dribbling, and whatever happens, happens.”

She was drawn to considering light in her work — at sunset, just before nightfall or in the early morning. When she woke at 3 a.m. and couldn’t sleep, she lit candles and drew the rooms around her, producing a series of half-dark interior spaces warmed by small pools of light.

The tone and shape of Mersky’s work has shifted over the years, sometimes wildly — “I like change a lot; I like to bring in the new,” she said — with her most recent venture being woodworking. She turned to shaping fallen wood into handrails for both the inside and outside of her home, as well as tables and other furniture, letting natural curves and textures dictate how the pieces end up. One favorite piece is a kind of leafless tree she formed and placed in her bathroom, the gnarled limbs of which extend over her clawfoot bathtub.

“I like the outdoors to be inside, because I want to be outdoors all the time,” she said.

These days, Mersky said, the urge to produce physical work has slowed; she put away her woodworking tools about two years ago after her beloved horse died.

“I just put everything down, and I haven’t gone back,” she said. “I don’t know where I’m going.”

She writes and journals, and said she’s continually looking for what she called a “nonaccumulative art form” that won’t leave anything behind. To that end, she’s sung with the World House Choir — what could be more nonaccumulative than making a joyful noise? — and fans of the beloved “Missa Gaia,” which the choir initially performed in 2015 and reprised in 2019, may remember that Mersky created a series of works to accompany its second performance.

“I’m a happy person when I’m creating and not so happy when I’m not,” she said. “I just really feel like I’m in service to beauty.”

The search for a creative practice that doesn’t produce more things, Mersky said, helps explain the desire this year to set some of her older work ablaze. The works she burned were not all favorites, and she didn’t think they all needed to survive into a future where they’d most likely be neither displayed nor seen.

Still, she said, though the desire to burn her work arose naturally, it didn’t come easily. Mersky said she lovingly bestows names on cars, tractors, even her chainsaw, as she imbues them with personality and tinges of her own memory.

“I have trouble letting go of things; things are not inanimate,” she said. “Objects are also alive to me.”

She said creating art has always been meditative — “The process is what seems really important, rather than the product,” she said — and when it’s time to hang pieces for a show, she no longer thinks of them, fundamentally, as hers. In that way, creating art has offered her a way to try her hand at surrender — a skill that she said, at this point in her life, has taken on a different weight.

“Believe me when I tell you, I don’t let go easily — but it’s a lesson in life, so I’m practicing,” she said. “And now that I’m 75, I feel like I really want to practice, because there’s a different outlook now for me.”

Through “Into the Light,” Mersky said, she’s also taken the opportunity to practice in another way. Unlike earlier shows, for which she often created new work after securing an exhibition date, this one looks backward. She said she’s chosen “a little bit of everything and not a lot of anything.”

The exhibition will feature some landscapes, some flowers, at least one horse. Within the small collection, she’ll present some of the flavors of the stylistic turns she’s made over the years — a tasting menu of the movement that has run through her work.

And with any luck, folks will be inspired by that movement to choose a piece — and a local nonprofit — and the piece will keep on moving.

“Into the Light” will be on display July 2–Aug. 31 in the Senior Center Fireplace Room Gallery. The exhibition may be viewed Monday–Friday, 9:30 a.m.–4 p.m., when the Fireplace Room is not in use for a class.