Recent Exhibition
Rebecca Dvorin Strong
Paintings
February 2- February 28, 2024
Elisabeth C. Miller Library
Center for Urban Horticulture
University of Washington Botanic Garden
3501 NE 41st Street
Seattle, WA 98195
206-543-0415
My goals as an artist are to express the beauty, mystery, and poetry of Nature, and to create highly personal artworks that also represent wider human concerns. To help invite the viewer into the experience of my artworks, I also display the processes, mediums, and studies that led to the creation of my work.
This exhibition included paintings of plants, trees, bees, flowers, and fruits painted in oil, gouache, watercolor, ink, and mixed media. I use these mediums in multiple layers of transparent, translucent, and opaque colors to create the illusion of light, space, and atmospheric conditions and to produce a luminous quality.
The Three Graces~Protected Orange Trees
Display at the Elisabeth C. Miller Library
The Three Graces~Protected Orange Trees
Ink, watercolor, and gouache on handmade Twinrocker paper
$1,500.00 each painting
May Bee-ings All Live Happily and Safe: A Thangka of Bee Metamorphosis
Display showing a hand-painted color chart, mixed paints in palettes, a color study, and a tiny brush used for fine details.
Persephone's Fruit: A Suite of Five Miniature Paintings
Display of the process from early sketches and studio journal notes, through the five stages and layers of paint used for each image, and various tools and color palettes.
Self-Portrait as a Tree in an Enclosure
Display of early studies along with the finished painting.
Self-Portrait as an Ailing Tree and Self Portrait as a Tree Being Healed
Display showing preliminary sketch and reference photo for the Ailing Tree
When I painted Self-Portrait as an Ailing Tree, I was reflecting on past illnesses, but I did not know that a few months after completing the painting I would be diagnosed with cancer.
Because gouache can be dissolved with water even after it is completely dry, in response to the cancer diagnosis, I brushed water onto the Ailing Tree to dissolve the painted growths and scars, thus symbolically melting away disease in my body, and I went on to paint over what was left of the white paint with colored gouache.
The colored gouache in Self-Portrait as a Tree Being Healed was literally painted on top of what remained of Self-Portrait as an Ailing Tree.
The Tree Being Healed is unfinished, and is thus an expression of the uncertainty I was experiencing at that time.
Self-Portrait as a Tree Beginning to Loosen and Self-Portrait as a Fertile Tree
Self-Portrait as a Young Tree Exhibiting Faults and Self-Portrait as a Tree Attempting Escape
Self-Portrait as a Regal Tree and New Growth
Woodland Plants
Oil on canvas
12 x 12 inches
$750.00 each painting