Rhaelene and Anna live in rural Arkansas and teach art at Southern Arkansas University. They have been friends for several years and used to walk together occasionally on the scenic local trail. However, at the beginning of the pandemic, they decided that it would be good for their mental health to walk every day. As visual artists they were always observant, but they found themselves noticing more details while walking together than they did separately.
As they walked, Rhaelene and Anna talked about their observations, drawing on their knowledge of art history and personal experiences to expand on ideas. Anna is a trained commercial artist who moved into fine art, and Rhaelene is a trained fine artist whose career prior to teaching was in commercial art. Coming from different artistic backgrounds, they had a great well of knowledge from which to draw. They referenced artists as different as comic artist Bernie Wrightson, Hudson River School painter Thomas Moran, surrealist painters like Rene Magritte and Lenore Carrington, and American painter and quilt maker Faith Ringgold, as well as many others. Their diverse personal experiences undoubtedly also influence their approaches to art making. Rhaelene’s formative years were spent in a multigenerational American family from rural areas of the Western US. Anna came to the US from Moldova when she was 12 and lived all her life in large cities until coming to Magnolia.
Eventually, because of the similarity of what they were drawn to during these walks, they decided to begin a collaborative project based on the same prompts. Anna and Rhaelene were not looking for “grand,” they were looking for “interesting.” Going into the project, they understood that they had different approaches to subject matter, but through the collaboration, they realized how different those approaches were. One of their first inspirations was a dent in a car bumper that skewed the reflection of the scene around it. In Anna’s drawing the skewed reflection became a portal into an alternate reality; Rhaelene’s painting focused on pattern, composition and interplay between foreground and background.
Through this collaboration, they discovered that they respond most to transformation and change. They began to focus on changes of weather, changes of light, how seasons affected the landscape, lifecycles of animals, and even the transformations that happen through decomposition. The complexity of their concepts grew as the collaborative project progressed since they were constantly challenging one another. The joint challenge allowed them to grow as artists and what they learned in the process fed into their teaching practices. What they saw originally as a short-term project, they now envision as an ongoing journey.
Rhaelene and Anna hope that their very different artwork based on the same inspirations will encourage viewers to try their hand at interpreting artistically what they see in their own way.