Rachel Brask is a contemporary abstract expressionist painter with impressionist tendencies. Her current work explores the sensation of looking through windows during torrential rains. Through these “Abstracted Rainy Moments” paintings, Brask seeks to show people a fresh perspective on rainy days. She has exhibited in solo exhibitions invitational and juried shows around New England, and recently made her international debut in Italy.
Brask has been an artist-in-residence at the Golden Apple Art Residency in Maine, Truro’s Castle Hill Center for the Arts Edgewood Farm on Cape Cod, and she was selected to be the very first artist of the pilot art residency program at the Tryon International Equestrian Center. She has received Best in Show for the “Autumn Rain” painting that inspired her current body of work. She has been honored to be selected for the Curatorial Mentorship Program and the Founders Award by Art League Rhode Island.
Rachel earned a B.A. in art from Houghton College, with concentrations in painting, graphic design & photography. When Brask is not in her studio painting, she spends her time doing graphic design, marketing, communications, photography, and sharing her love of art through teaching community classes and private art lessons. Her studio is located in East Providence, RI.
Rachel creates original oil paintings, teaches art lessons, and is currently accepting commissions for paintings.
Statement
When you look out through a window on a rainy day — what do you see? When I look through a window during a rain storm, I study how the sheets of rain pouring down the panes causes distortion of the view outside. The rain flow abstracts the lens through which an observer sees the outside world in that moment. Colors blend together, articulated lines and shapes become blurred, and the motion of the continuing rain makes the scene even more dynamic. In these moments, I’m reminded of a poem by Abraham Sutzkever, that these colors, these moments, “…all this illuminated by the rain.”
Through these oil paintings on canvas, I seek to capture a single abstracted moment between a rainy day and its observer; between a moment in reality and its abstract experience. In the process of creating these images, I chose to use oil paint because of its slow drying time, incorporating a hefty mass of stand oil, allowing gravity to continue its work on the paintings long after I’ve stepped away from the easel — pulling the colors and paint with it as it continued its slow descent down the surface of the canvas. Even after the paint has dried, the evidence of these viscous drips have become suspended in motion, frozen in the gradual downward crawl. The viscous texture of this drip beckons the viewer in to experience the texture of this rainy moment, making tactile the tangible.