Rebecca is a Connecticut native. She received her B.A. with honors from Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, and her M.A.Ed. from the Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford. Artist and instructor at both the secondary and college level, she continues to explore and develop her personal vocabulary in her oil paintings. She is a member of Connecticut Women Artists and the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts, her work juried into numerous exhibitions.

 

The image, when I began to paint, was more a vehicle than a focus. The ascendency of abstraction in its many forms certainly influenced my work, but I learned about painting from artists like Stephen Brown, who produced exquisite realist paintings. Lush with texture, color, and light, his work was as much about the paint as the subject matter. 

 

I’m always fascinated by that sudden appearance of the unplanned. My more recent paintings differ not so much stylistically from earlier work—though there may be a departure in scale and format—but in the way, they begin. I start with an image: a cup, a place, a face; some images are more abstract than others. There is something of import in them, though not always easily articulated. The philosopher Emil Kant said that how we perceive objects or phenomena are not the things in themselves but what he called “noumena.” They exist independently. I await that moment of discovery when the intrinsic nature of a thing breaks through. I begin to see each of my paintings as a kind of snapshot taken as a veil is pulled aside to provide a glimpse of the thing itself.