“Until recently, I don’t remember really experiencing spring.  Growing up, the places my family lived were mostly seasonless, except for the slight weather differences of rainy seasons or dry summers.  Seasons felt more like arbitrary measurement of time and something to build schedules around.  I’ve always been familiar with the broader cultural associations of spring -- spring is growth, spring is new beginnings, it’s about things growing back and pretty flowers and pastels.  For a long time it felt kind of frivolous.  If you were to ask me my favorite season was three years ago, I might have said ‘winter’ just to be different. 

“That has been changing dramatically in the last four years, since moving to the Midwest, and especially rural Wisconsin.  I have this tremendous newfound appreciation of the Spring.  Especially now that I’m out of the city, I get to notice the way the landscape is actually changing.  It’s so exciting to see the horizon line get those barely-there tints of green, the bizarre alien textures of flowering trees, the rain, and the birds. There’s a rabbit that lives in our backyard and I get to watch it all the time from the window by my easel.”

Rachel Dinwiddie

“I feel like my favorite creatures change every day, but I was drawn to snakes at first for their formal qualities.  Having a snake in your composition forces the viewer to wind lazily around the picture plane.  But I also just think they’re cute.  Snakes have this cultural implication of cunning, of clever malicious trickery, ambition, and danger.  But from my experience, snakes are just kind of silly.  Like everybody else, they seem to just want to enjoy life by sleeping on a nice warm rock in the sun.  I’m aware of the religious implication of pairing snakes and round fruit in gardens.  If anything, I’m looking to remove these elements from that context, and appropriate the imagery for something completely different.  The snakes aren’t malicious, they’re just chilling.” 

Rachel Dinwiddie

“I noticed that I have a tendency to search for myself in objects when I’m alienated from community.  The landscape shirt happened because I wanted to paint something in order to own it.  I’m interested in the phenomena of online shopping, and I noticed that I tend to get fixated on an object.  Picturing the context of how the piece of clothes would be worn, I imagine the type of person who would wear it, and it becomes this fantasy self.  But if I buy it, the allure disappears as soon as it becomes a part of my real life and no longer an escapist fantasy.

“I wanted to see if painting it would make that itch in my head go away.  I thought about painting as an act of possessing -- spending time with the object by looking at it and experiencing it.  Also, by constructing the space the object exists in, I can maintain the escapist fantasy.”

Rachel Dinwiddie

“I really lost connection to communities this year.  For political reasons, I became alienated from the environment where I grew up.  I also moved away from Chicago after graduating and had trouble keeping in contact with that community.  I coped by self-isolating, which honestly made it so much worse.  I stopped going on instagram and looking at work I admired, because I felt so guilty about not being as productive.  Like many this year, I spent a lot of time distracting myself with the internet, needing to constantly consume information and entertainment to distract myself from that feeling of helplessness.  But even with so much time online, I had trouble texting people back -- even close friends I really care about.  It’s funny, I think it was actually more work to avoid communities than it would have been to participate.

“The longer I spent alone, the more I started imagining scenarios where my communities wouldn’t want me back -- that it was too late to connect again.  It feels silly now, knowing that everything picked up again when I was willing to dive back in.  I’m so grateful to everyone in my life who was so patient with me as I dropped off the face of the earth.  I still really miss engaging in physical places and participating with communities in person, but this spring it doesn’t feel nearly as overwhelming.”

Rachel Dinwiddie

“Since I moved, my work has become a lot more about desire.  Before, a lot of my practice involved documenting the world around me and spitting it out through painting -- interactions with friends, inside jokes, observations of my environment and the people occupying it.  I worked primarily from singular reference photos I took with my phone, altered through the process of painting. 

“Now, I make a lot more constructed spaces (instead of observed spaces) -- spaces that I wish existed and that I could experience.  Even when I take images or objects I encounter personally, I incorporate a lot more imagination, filling spaces with as much visual content as possible, regardless of if it follows the laws of perspective and reality.”

Rachel Dinwiddie