RACHEL'S BLOG

This diptych was commissioned and inspired by the piece Sin Fronteras. I started the pieces by choosing pieces of paper from one of my old almanacs, then ripping and gluing them onto the wood panel.

This painting started off as a total experiment. It was started during my second workshop with Mark Russell in 2017. I believe I only put two layers of paint on this piece at the workshop.

This began as a leftover paint painting, which basically means I didn’t want to throw away whatever paint was left at the end of a painting session. I didn’t really have any intention of making it look like anything at this point, it was just a way to not waste paint.

As I have mentioned in some of my previous blog posts, many of the pieces I share are very small studies. The purpose of them is to hopefully create something interesting enough to eventually turn into a much larger piece.

This commission piece is of the wedding of some friends of mine. They were married in New Orleans in January of 2019. The bride’s mother and sister had asked me at the rehearsal dinner if I would be willing to make a painting after the wedding, and I agreed to!

The piece featured in this blog post is the painting on the bottom right. I am painting on Arches oil paper and was focused on doing small studies in hopes that I would get some exciting pieces that could one day be tackled as larger pieces.

This newest oil and cold wax painting was loosely inspired by the photo above that I took while on one of my visits to Mexico. I have had it in my mind to paint this, or something inspired by it since I took the photo in 2016. As you’ll see the biggest piece of inspiration was the cool blue water.

So this was my first ever attempt at painting on Arches Oil Paper. It was during my first oil and cold wax workshop and I was attempting to follow what I had been successfully doing on the wood panels with the wax, but the paper doesn’t take the oil paint in the same way that the boards do.

This piece was inspired by my desire to explore different textures. Prior to putting any paint on this piece I glued down some wrapping tissue paper to create a wrinkled texture. Then I just began putting paint down, I poured out a few colors and went to town with no real rhyme or reason behind it.

I painted this piece back in 2016, around the time I had started adding collage elements into my work. This piece was an attempt to not use every color ever made in one of my paintings.

This commissioned piece required some research on my part. The client wanted a piece for her mother who was a Reiki master/teacher and an Akashic Records reader, which I had never heard of, so I started looking into it.

This piece began as another experimental mixed media. I had such success with “Breached” that I wanted to do it again! This initial under painting was done some time in 2015, I stared at it in this phase for probably a couple months. I finally decided it wasn’t going to work as well as Breached.

I painted this piece back in 2016, around the time I had started adding collage elements into my work. This piece was an attempt to not use every color ever made in one of my paintings.

This painting is the first really complex piece of my New Orleans series. When I started it, I had no idea it would send me down a path of painting so many pieces of these New Orleans street scenes. This piece is pretty special to me as I took the photo on my first trip there.

This piece began as such an ugly painting, but it reminded me that no matter how much you want to give up on a piece, DON’T. It can always turn around and be salvaged. Unfortunately I don’t have a photo of the entire first layer of this piece but here is a close up of the crow and the surrounding area. It looks like rough to put it nicely.

Before I go into the process behind this piece, I want to explain its personal significance. This is not only number eleven of my ongoing New Orleans series, it is also a self portrait of me on Halloween dressed as the amazing Frida Kahlo, at one of my favorite bars in Nola, Sylvain.

This commission was painted in 2017 for a good friend and huge hawks fan. Being one myself, I was pretty excited to complete this piece. The first step was a VERY basic sketch, if I didn’t know what the end result was supposed to be I would have no idea what the sketch was supposed to be depicting.

This will probably be my shortest blog post as I painted this piece back in 2016, before I decided to make a real effort to fully document the progress of my work, however my process is still very similar to what it is now. It started with a very simple sketch, and a block in of lights and darks.

If you’re following my blog, you’ve probably seen many of these photos. Its how I start the majority of my oil and cold wax pieces, with a layer of black to set in some initial composition pieces as well as scratches and mark making for subsequent layers.

This scene was captured at the Spotted Cat Music Club in New Orleans. My process for this piece was very much like all my the previous New Orleans paintings where I started with a loose sketch of shapes. This sketch was actually a little bit more detailed than usual because the piece and figures are larger than most of the other pieces in the series.

This 24×36 piece took twenty hours to complete. I started and finished this one while I was struggling to complete Cafe Du Monde, which is pretty crazy if you look at all the detail just in the balconies and ladders. Anyway, you can see I began this piece with a very simple drawing, just using basic shapes and no real detail.

This 24×30 painting was completed around the same time as “Cafe Du Monde” and “Pirate’s Alley” were in the works. This piece took just over ten hours to complete, about the same amount of time as “Cafe Du Monde,” which is a testament to how hard of a time I had with that small painting.

This scene was captured in Maison, a bar on Frenchmen street in New Orleans. This 18×20 piece took just under 10 hours to complete. I seemed to have forgotten to snap a photo of just the sketch before I put any paint on it but luckily you can still pretty much see what the sketch looked like in the first photo; loose and basic shapes.

This piece, as small as it is, was one of the more challenging of the NoLa series. It took over ten hours to get it to a place where it felt complete. I struggled mostly with keeping the overall feel to the piece loose and painterly; not so much like a photo, mostly all the people under the tented area of the cafe but you can also see some tightness in the tent itself as I had to repaint that a few times.

These photos show the major steps of one of the first few pieces in my New Orleans series. This 24×36 piece took slightly over 20 hours to complete. Just like in The Biker, I start out with the grid system as I find that the simplest way to draw out a complicated subject.

This commission was based on an excerpt from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The client essentially gave me the page he wanted from the book and told me to paint my visual interpretation.

This painting took me just over ten hours to complete. It was not done in one sitting but rather multiple sessions of an hour or two at a time. These photos show the process of this painting which is part of my New Orleans series.