image: Rachael Wren, Perch, 2024, Oil On Canvas, 30”x30”.
Painter Rachael Wren’s art practice is fueled by countless decisions. The results are complex paintings that dance with unwavering focus on structure and color. In conversation, Wren shared with me insights on the influence of getting permission to ignore trends, kick-starting a new body of work, and memories of color and light.
Michele Jaslow: One thing people should know about you is the complex interconnection between your life experiences and your work.
Rachael Wren: Although my work is abstract, it grows out of experiences I’ve had in real places with people I care about. Memories of the color, light, and emotional tenor of those times drive the paintings. It feels essential to me to have a deep connection with things outside of the studio that I can bring into the work.
During my show, The Long Way Home, at Rick Wester Fine Art, I had the amazing experience of many people telling me that they felt a lot of emotion in the paintings. That meant so much to me because that was what I put into them. Themes of love, loss, and lifecycles were in my mind as I painted, along with memories of important people and places in my life. For me, the magic of painting lies in its transmission of feeling from one human to another, and it was so gratifying to know that viewers experienced that with my work.
Michele: Your work is multi-layered and must require an impressive amount of focus and commitment to vision. How do you approach creating a new body of work?
Rachael: I typically work in loose series — I always have a bunch of paintings going on in the studio at once. They often end up being variations on a theme or idea. Something will happen in one painting that I want to explore in a slightly different way in the next. As the body of work develops, I think about how to make these differences significant, so that the group feels unified as a whole, but each painting is clearly distinct from the others.
The finished work looks orderly, but it does not usually feel that way when I’m making it. There is a lot of not-knowing, of feeling my way through the process and responding to what I’m seeing, rather than planning it all out from the beginning.