Rachel received her BFA from Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and her MFA from the University of New Mexico. She is currently an adjunct faculty for Central New Mexico Community College, Fine Arts Department, and private painting group workshops.
Rachel’s paintings function as textural snapshots; individual entities that capture specific moments or ideas and yet still relate to each other by the nature of the markmaking, color, and spatial relationships between the forms. The paintings speak about a transition that hasn’t been very consistent in its progression or strength. It has been, at alternate times; gradual, painful, lovely and overwhelming. Nothing has been expected, and yet everything has been welcomed.
The visual strands that Rachel creates weave together to form the fabric of her particular process, or progress, through this transitional space. And though they’re generally non-representational, Rachel intends that people identify with them out of the memories or moments that the colors and marks recollect. That personal identification is part of what Rachel is so drawn to about painting. Painting gives Rachel an opportunity to connect with people, some of whom she has never met, but all with whom she has shared some common experience. Rachel’s most recent paintings have started incorporating recognizable organic shapes.
Rachel see her work as a sort of visual topography; a recording of internal and external experiences within a carefully constructed space.
It is in these carefully constructed spaces – between the active and the still, between constraint and freedom, and between logic and instinct – that she takes the viewer to new landscapes by way of a personal adventure.
