Bellingham based artist Rachel May has been painting intense landscapes and waterscapes from sites around Whatcom County for several years. Working in oil on birch panels prepared with shellac rather than gesso, May works to evoke a sense of light, transparency, reflection, and atmosphere while still retaining the primacy of opaque paint-laden gestures on wood. She draws inspiration from a wide variety of sources, including Richard Diebenkorn, Peter Doig, John Cole, Thomas Wood, Hart James, Emily Carr, J. M. W. Turner, and Lucian Freud.

Rachel is primarily self taught. Although she majored in Fine Art Painting for her first bachelor’s degree in 1988, and also took classes at UW for a couple of years after first moving to Seattle in 1989, she discovered early on that in order to find her own vision for her work, she had to intentionally unlearn most of what she had been taught. She loved figurative, gestural work in charcoal and ink. Favorite subjects included mythology, Japanese butoh dance, and tales of heartbreak. Her highly personal, illustrative, gestural sensibilities went against mainstream art values in the late eighties and early nineties, and she was encouraged to instead develop more conceptual sensibilities and to paint flat, masculine forms colliding in two dimensional space. It just wasn’t her thing, and for almost 25 years she struggled with a severe artistic block.

Oil painting was Rachel’s deepest passion, though, and she longed to find her way back to it. She took a plein air landscape painting class with local painter Thomas Wood in 2012 and a fire was lit. Landscapes are the painter’s equivalent of love songs. It’s the most natural thing in the world to respond to a beautiful place by trying to capture the light, space, texture, gesture, even transparency and atmosphere in paint. You don’t have to worry about being original, insightful, revelatory, or relevant because no one but you sees what you see on that day, in that place, with your eyes and spirit. It’s just you singing a visual love song to nature. She has learned to respond intuitively to the places she paints.

Rachel’s vision is to create paintings with a sense of place while also celebrating the lusciousness of oil paint on wood, its fluid texture, the way it can be either opaque or transparent on the panel, the way it can mimic depth, reflection, movement, and atmosphere while still looking like paint. It is vital to her to retain her natural gestures and impulses with paint, the the unique way her hands move it around with her lovingly selected collection of brushes. Her new works demonstrate the ongoing evolution of her vision, including some forays into true abstraction. Stay posted. New work will be added monthly.