Believe it or not, the beginnings of the Buddha on this month's cover were rescued from a pile of garbage.

When Christina Varga found the figure, she didn't yet know that it would become a Buddha, only that "It looked like a reverential object, something that someone had made with respect. And didn't, for some reason, get finished."

Varga has been considered a visionary artist, but she doesn't claim to have any visions. Her iconographic work depicts subjects as varied as Jesus, Mohammed, and David Bowie. One can see where she gets her reputation. The dumpster-dived Buddha came to her during a phase when she had been putting gold glitter halos on everything that she could get her hands on, from magazine cutouts to religious effigies. So, naturally, this was the first touch she put on the figure.

The piece transcends an isolated phase in the artists' work. After her halo phase, Varga notes, she moved on to mosaic and mixed media cutouts. And as the Buddha remained unfinished, Varga became increasingly involved in her new gallery in Woodstock.

"Being a businessperson has caused me to go more abstract. Which has led me to do cutouts," she explains. "The wood mosaics, the canvas mosaics, the mixed media cutouts that I glue down...and incorporating that with my representational and figurative work."

It wasn't until she outlined it in wood mosaic that Varga realized that the figure was Buddha, donned in a Chinese ancestral robe.

Varga began her work as an artist primarily as an oil painter. From the outset, she worked with iconography and figurative pieces. Since her transition into mosaics, she has gotten more experimental. Old dominoes, Scrabble pieces, and metal objects found on sidewalks are among the preferred mediums in her current work.

Varga marries the religious world with the world of rejected trash. Her tryptic of Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammad serves as a bridge to her current found-object work, which includes All Seeing Eye, another wood mosaic, and other introspections on the spiritual life in found art.

Varga's work will be on view at the Varga a-Go-Go event at the Varga Gallery & Studio in Woodstock on December 9. (845) 679 4005; www.christinavarga.com.

—Rebecca Wild Nelson