a year-long, limited-edition print series by Frances Matassa.
Each month, active members receive a print of an original oil painting, accompanied by a handmade studio zine. Together, these pieces form an evolving body of work that is part archive, part correspondence, part artist book assembled slowly over time.
The zine includes studio observations, sketches, visual fragments, and reflections on process. It’s meant to capture the quieter thoughts and in-between moments that live alongside the paintings but don’t always make it into finished work.
The Monthly Moth is designed to feel like receiving mail from the studio: tactile, intimate, and thoughtfully made. Let me be your studio pen pal!
Because of the hands-on nature of the project, membership is limited to 75 spots per month. Subscribers are invited to follow the work as it unfolds month by month, building a collection of prints and printed ephemera that together map a year of painting.
How It Works
1. Choose your subscription type
- Monthly — $25/month
Billed each month on the date of your initial subscription. Cancel anytime.
2. Subscribe by the 1st of the month to receive that month's Moth in the mail (i.e subscribe by April 1st to receive April's collection).Â
Each issue is carefully hand-assembled in the studio and mailed directly to you.
3. Issues ship the first week of each month.
From there, new editions are released and mailed the first week of each month through March 2027.
What to Expect
One 5" × 7" mystery print of an original oil painting.
Each print is part of a limited edition of 75 and is created exclusively for The Monthly Moth. These images will not be reproduced in this format again, making the full set of 12 prints unique to this year-long series.
(Produced in partnership with a local Brooklyn print shop.)
A 4.25" × 5.5" zine-style newsletter
A letter from the editor
A custom sticker
The print image is a surprise each month. Part of the experience is not knowing which painting will arrive, and discovering it when you open the envelope.
The zine contains a collection of drawings, studio notes, and thoughts about the small, in-between moments that orbit the paintings.
The Monthly Moth is a slow accumulation. Over the course of the year, subscribers build a collection of prints and handmade zines that archive a year in the studio.
About the Artist
Frances Matassa (b. 1994, Seattle) is a figurative painter based in Brooklyn. Her work explores the imprints of trauma, memory, metamorphosis and the soft tension between the physical and the interior world. Matassa’s often life-sized oil paintings feature compositions with landscapes whose boundaries of reality blur into dreamlike scenes. Figures, emerging from dissociation, reconnect with the tactile world as if preserved in a rich sense memory. Matassa’s vivid palette amplifies emotional resonance while creating unease and disorientation. Recurring motifs and symbolic insects embody transformation, decay, and the fleeting nature of memory.