To be considered as a feature artist on rachelwagner.com please send samples and links to your web site if you have one to rachel@rachelwagner.com. We are looking for visual art, poetry, music or any other medium you can send.
Featured Artist
"I long for my photography to be a Voice cultivating an urgency to take action in effort to establish Justice for the oppressed & Voiceless." --Billy Scanlan
Where the eyes go the body follows. I find this mysterious truth repeating itself over and over. As an established writer, now working on my third novel, I did not imagine myself maneuvering through life with images rather than words, and certainly not with watercolor. Working with a stick is even better than working with a brush. I love the straight, angular, irregular lines a stick makes juxtaposed with fluid brush strokes. I never expected to become proficient in the language of image and color. When I am working with a painting it is hard to rest until it is complete. But I do realize how important a “resting” time is, both for the image and myself. A retreat from the work, gives me an opportunity to sneak up on it again, to see what is saying to me, to see where it falters, to recognize the need for added dialogue of either color or shape. Choosing the paper is the fun. Afterwards, I find an image for which it is best suited. At the beginning of 2008, I went to Paris for four months. Arriving in Paris, where I did not know the language, the people or the terrain catapulted me into expression through images. Although living in a foreign city was more difficult than I imagined, it was also immensely rewarding in surprising ways. Suddenly the only common tongue was one of color and shapes. Assessing my experiences, defining my losses, relinquishing my dreams and embracing the new and the strange but apparently safe and hopeful, happened by way of a brush and paints. Seeing the completed images of what was beyond words eased me through the process of embracing heartbreaking realities and on into the foreign landscape.
My Paris collection moves from simplistic images to paintings overlaid with pattern and color. In those actualized on parchment, there is an organic quality evocative of the meticulous, intricate process of transformation. The collages allowed a safe eruption of a complicated mess.
In addition to painting, I am an author. “The Color of Grace” was published in 2000 by Fleming Revell. Since then I have written, “Blood Exodus”, the mythic retelling of the Gospel in an Arabian setting. “Ezekiel 37”, the battle between God and an artist over the fate of her mentally ill brother. “Honey in the Bones”, a work in progress is an exploration of what became of Delilah after Samson pulls the temple down.
Currently, I am particularly interested in the art of making altered books. I hope to find enough time and space to actualize all the stories, images and zillion pages fluttering around in my head. I am an affiliate of Amhersts Writers and Artists and teach generative writing workshops in my home.