featured maker: Rachel Loyacono
Rachel is a fine artist in New Orleans, Louisiana who we are shamelessly obsessed with! The use of color and imagination in her figurative works blow us away and we are so grateful to own three stunning pieces of her work. We are jazzed for her interview be our 2021 kick-off.
How did you get started as an artist?
I come from a family of makers. I grew up watching my grandfather create wooden sculptures, vases and bowls. He also made oil paintings of mythical scenes and copies of Van Gogh’s sunflowers and self portraits. At a young age, I remember pouring over his books of impressionist painters and just being completely taken by the images.
Later in high school, I started taking lessons with a really incredible local painter, Rodger Lawrence. Roger was diagnosed with ALS shortly before I met him. We would communicate with handwritten notes some of which I still have, and later through a device that spoke for him in this robotic tone. But Roger’s primary form of communication was painting. It was at this time in my life that I felt like I understood the importance of visual art. That what we all want is to communicate and connect. Painting is a direct link to artists past and present, a conversation with ourselves and with the viewer.
We are so enamored by your use of color and light in your paintings. What inspires these unique palettes?
Ever since my first color theory class in college, I’ve been interested in the way we perceive color. It’s tricky and ever changing. We would do these experiments based on Joseph Albers’ work, where we tried to make four colors look like three and three colors look like four different colors. We were constantly searching for the “glow” that a painting takes on when the colors are interacting just right. It’s definitely elusive and every painting I make is still an experiment as far as that goes.
If you could spend one day with any artist/designer/musician etc who would it be? What would y’all do?
I miss the motivation and energy of working alongside artists, so I think if I could spend the day with anyone, It would probably be one of the many contemporary artists I admire at the moment… Doron Langberg, Jennifer Packer, Jenna Gribbon. I’d just like to be in the studio with them, to observe their practice, talk about art, where figure painting is at now and where it’s going.
Photo Credit: Simone Henault
Is there anything that you collect?
I thought long and hard about this one and eventually asked my friend if there was anything that she could think of that I collect. She said, “You collect your own Paintings.” Which made me laugh. But I guess It’s kind of true, they’re hanging all over my house. I make a lot of paintings of friends and family. I think those pieces often don’t find homes because they are more intimate and specific than some of my other work. So I hang them up in my space, but I don’t mind because seeing the faces of the people I love every day brings me so much joy.
Self Proclaimed ________
Gummy Bear Connoisseur!
If you could give any advice to an emerging painter - what would it be?
I’m constantly telling myself to loosen up. And to not be afraid to just make the work. Suspend judgment until after its made. That’s my humble advice, but I also think everyone should read Kerry James Marshall’s Letters to a Young Artist. In it, He says, “Artists are not magicians or shamans, prophets or seers. We make stuff and the devices we use to transfigure the commonplace are recognizable. Isolate, re-contextualize, shift scale, shift material, invert…” I try to keep that quote in mind. Remembering that art making is not about fabricating an end result, but that it is exploratory and investigative.
If you could hang ANY artwork in your collection, what would it be?
Ah! What a tough question. The first thing that comes to mind is a giant Matisse painting. Probably The Red Studio. The first time I saw it at MOMA, I wanted to live inside it, so living with it would be the next best thing.
