Cora Yee's artwork is easily recognizable but not easy to decipher. Hers is a world of spiritual enchantment where fish have legs to walk in the rain, parachutes fall from a murky sky onto a stupa (Buddhist shrine) harboring a clear sky within, and dragons, makaras (Indian and Tibetan water monsters) and nagas (serpent spirits) cross paths with American sneakers.

Born in Honolulu in 1952, Yee attended Punahou School and graduated from the University of Hawai'i-Manoa with a bachelor of fine-arts degree. She spent eight years in Europe decorating and restoring harpsichords until she returned to Hawai'i in 1987 to focus on printmaking.

She has a reputation for her meticulous registration of silkscreen-printed works on paper that include the application of up to 70 different colors. Basically, she makes multiple screens that separate the colors, and after lining them up with the image registration, pulls the color with a squeegee across the screen onto a piece of paper.

But Yee is more of a story-seeder. Her artwork germinates stories. Her images appeal to all ages in that they are simple but not simplistic. Her world travels inform her work. She references mythology from many cultures as well as spiritual and architectural icons. Yee's images have been made into sterling silver jewelry and embroidered on handbags.

She has recently taken a leap of faith. Her new work can be seen in a group show (she has been an invited artist for four consecutive years) at the Academy Art Center at Linekona this month and next, in her first solo show of new work at the Koa Gallery, with acrylic paintings on canvas, encaustic (hot wax and oil paints) mixed-media pieces and drawings.

For almost 20 years, Yee has exhibited her work in Europe, Japan and North America, and is in the permanent collections of the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the City and County of Honolulu and the Gerbode Foundation.

What got you into art initially?

I think it was being an only child; it's how I occupied my time. My mom always had paper, scissors, glue and crayons for me. I don't really remember watching TV a lot as a child. I've always done some sort of artwork, because it gave me pleasure. When I was a teenager, I used to copy things. The first book I ever bought, at 14, was the woodcuts of Albrecht Durer. I was so fascinated with the magic and precision of his lines. I guess it's carried with me all these years because I still love lines. How he was able to form three-dimensional shapes just with lines is fascinating to me.

Would you say that Albrecht Durer had the most influence on you as an artist?

Not completely. I remember finding a children's book called "Yellow Yellow" by Frank Asch with illustrations by Mark Stamaty. The artist had goofy drawings of people with their heads turned upside down, little cars on people's feet and things like that. That book did it for me; I was charmed by it. It showed me that I could do whatever I wanted to do.

Do you feel like you had a calling to be an artist?

When I was a teenager I wanted to either be in a rock 'n' roll band or a race-car driver. After that, I never thought about it. It's just something that I do.

What made you switch from screen-printing to painting?

I've actually been painting a little all along, but in 1995, after a show at Ramsay's Gallery of my larger screen-printed works, I came down with carpal tunnel syndrome. The weight of the screens and the big squeegees sent my hands and arms into a tizzy, so I stopped printmaking.

That was a difficult time for me because I enjoyed the process. I couldn't screen-print for the next five years and went through a lot of interesting scenarios about what I would be doing in the future. Little by little, I got the use of my hands back, and can paint now. That's one of the reasons I use the hand image so much in my work. I do want to take a painting class, though. One can never know everything. I look at a painting as a step — not a finished thing. You can always make it better, learn more. But I think painting is easier because you can paint over your mistakes or quickly take them off. With the printmaking technique I was using, you couldn't do that.

Your screen prints were full of whimsy. Now, your work seems darker, more serious. What happened?

I still love whimsy, but I have a deeper feeling now that whimsy and laughter isn't all there is to life. My husband, Roman (who is from Nepal), has given me the gift of seeing the world and people in the world differently. Life in general, for the rest of the world, is really different from the life lived in developing countries. And yet, in all of their struggles and moments of fear, political and socioeconomic turmoil, so many of these people are incredibly genuine and generous — which is extraordinary to me. Most of these paintings are dark and serious. While doing them, I thought about what I really felt in my heart. The main thing is love — love for family. Basically, how one lives in this world, with things going on around and within, and finds the most powerful thing of all is love and trust. That's kind of serious. That's what I am trying to communicate with these particular images. They portray unpleasant circumstances that might arise, as indicated by flames and fire, and how one deals with that through the water and waves and returns to calm or normalcy. Nepal's culture is fascinating to me, and I love working with these images. I worked with them even before I met Roman. So it seems appropriate that some of the work is of him, using Nepalese images.

What advice would you give anyone aspiring to be an artist?

Experiment, have a good time. Sometimes it's not fun, that's just part of the process and part of life in general. Don't think of things as being finite. It may be complete as an image, but it is usually a study for the next thing. And that will be a study for the next thing. You'll never be finished. You might never be 100 percent happy with what you've done in the end, but that is what I think creating art is — it's always taking things a little further, going places you haven't been. Sometimes, going back in time, rethinking that moment and portraying it in a different way.

The artist, with "Against All Odds." Her work, she says, is about how love and trust exist in a chaotic world.