About
Rachel Nelson
I paint flowers with alarming frequency. I have always mused that maybe it is a bit of a cop out, artistically, to choose innately beautiful subjects. What is there left for an artist to do, when starting with such perfection? Perhaps it is my way of appreciating and immortalizing a peak moment of a transient subject—one that will first bud, then bloom, only to fade, and finally wilt (as a metaphor, that process is poetic in its own right!) At the heart of it, though, there is nothing more that I love to do than to delight and obsess over the subtle nuances of color and texture of a magnificent bloom.
In tandem, I am absolutely transfixed with examining light through the lens of my paintbox. I love studying—and attempting to depict—light reflected, light refracted, ambient light, direct light, cast shadows, form shadows, occlusion shadow, everything in between. It is a beautiful and profound truth to me that an object can take on the color of adjacent objects thanks to the properties of reflected light. That is likely true for us as humans as well: we take on the light and the shadows of those we surround ourselves with, and in both cases there is beauty to be found in both light and shadow.
