4 Be: Sustaining Painting

I am an award-winning artist living and working in south Florida, USA. I have a vision. It is a construct for binding equality, inclusion, and a healthy world. For almost a decade, I investigate these concepts through creating other-worldly ecospheres in wall-sized and intimate-scaled paintings, mixed media, and assemblage artwork. I explore connection, kinship and sustainability among diverse people, nature, and technology, and rebel against their absence. Ideas of belonging, isolation, hope, loss, diaspora, and self-determination erupt. The integration of these concepts are rooted in my experiences as a woman with a diverse multi-cultural American/Jewish and Armenian/Christian family history and heritage, and birthplace in Japan. I don't always recognize their imprint in my creative process. I like the mystery. In my paintings, people, nature, and technology rupture and collide. They are in a state of flux. Androgynous human figures defy age, gender, and race. Water towers, cement factories, and buildings jockey for empowering sustainability. I sometimes meld verses from the Bible, Koran, and Buddhism that reference our shared connection and commitment to the stewardship of the environment. They bind humanity. In two-dimensional hybridized worlds, I investigate balance and discord between abstraction, realism, and surrealism and relationships to space and time. In three-dimensional work, I experiment with oozing paint, bent wood branches, torn paper, undulating corrugated cardboard, sharp straight pins, and gritty sandpaper. I attempt to harmonize unexpected materials with and without perceived societal value. All of creation, in its diverse splendor, is of equal importance. There is no hierarchy. Through my artwork, I set the table for enriching dialog, points of view, and learning from a wide audience. The unforeseen connections that are made during these interactions enliven my practice and transcend the physical art. www.ReneeRey.com