Darnell has been painting her unique woven canvases for twenty years. Recently she has developed a technique that continues her use of canvas and gold leaf though in a more simplified and minimalist form. The canvas strips are not only the surface for oil paint but also a design element creating a linear graphic.

 

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

 

Rachel Darnell on “Woven canvas”

 

I developed the technique of woven canvas to represent and emphasize the interconnectedness and interdependence of all things. It is a simple structure, yet profound in its strength. I combine the immediacy and expressiveness of painting with the primitive structure of weaving. My travels into some of the most ancient cities of the world have inspired my use of gold leafing, like that, which has been used to convey divinity since antiquity. Gold leaf creates a jewel-like quality in the hues and pigments and evokes the tonal qualities of the ancients. Modern influence for my work comes from the fiber artist Olga DeAmaral and field colorist Mark Rothko. The field colorists’ statement, “elemental truth is conveyed by the simple expression of complex thought,” has become a tenet to my process. I attempt to revive ancient, spiritual themes in my work, and find expression for them in our modern world.

 

EDUCATION

BFA 1998   Memphis College of Art , Major: Decorative Design, concentration in Fiber
Viola-Joyce Quigley Memorial Textile Award, Lytle McKee Memorial Scholarship, Shainberg Scholarship
University of Memphis, 27 hours toward BFA
BA 1984   Emory University, Major: Religion-Judaic Studies
Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, one year
Austin College, Sherman, TX, one year
 

 

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

 
2010- present Bentley Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ
2009 - present   Translations Gallery, Denver, CO
2009   Group Show Translations Gallery
2005   New Mexico Museum of Art, Juried Exhibition: New Mexico Women Artists
2004 - present   Darnell Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM
2004   Art Expo New York, Jacob Javitz Center
2000-2003    Waxlander Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
1999   Contemporary 1999, Jufied Competition, Fuller’s Art Lodge, Los Alamos, NM
1997-1998   Waxlander Khadoure Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM
1997   Expressions in Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM
1996   Art Resources, Birmingham, MI
1994   Raleigh Gallery, DCOTA, Miami, FL; Seventh Annual Juried Competition: Bakehouse Art Complex, Miami, FL
1993   Boca Raton Museum of Art
1992   Fifth Annual Juried Competition: Bakehouse Art Complex, Miami, FL
1991   Brooks Museum of Art: Art Today Benefit Exhibition, Memphis, TN; Southern Exposure: Juried Competition, Germantown, TN; Bell Ross Gallery, Memphis, TN
1989   Richard’s Gallery, Memphis, TN
1988   Senior Exhibit, Memphis College of Art; Fiber Exhibit, Memphis College of Art
1986   Third Place, Print Show, Malone and Hyde, Memphis, TN; Fiber Exhibit, Memphis College of Art
1985   University Gallery, Memphis State University

CORPORATE COLLECTIONS

Four Seasons, Denver, CO
Vedder Price, Chicago, IL
Edgewater Plaza, Chicago, IL
Hardin’s Sysco, Memphis, TN
International Paper, Germantown, TN
Wesley Manor, Atlanta, GA

PUBLICATIONS

TRADITIONAL HOME: March 2006 Show House Show Case
“Unity II” by Rachel Darnell
ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL NORTH, Gallery guide: Artfeast Feb, 2006,
“Passion V” by Rachel Darnell
PASATIEMPO: THE NEW MEXICAN’S Weekly Magazine of the Arts: May 2-8, 2003,
“La Luna” by Rachel Darnell
FOCUS SANTA FE: January - March 2003,
“A Mystical Universe”: Rachel Darnell takes un into a spacious world.
IONS: NOETIC SCIENCE REVIEW: September - November 2001
“Connecting Inner Assets”; “Soliel” by Rachel Darnell
NEW MEXICO MILLENIUM COLLECTION: A Twenty-First Century Celebration of Fine Art in New Mexico: 2000
“La Reina de la Salsa” by Rachel Darnell
FOCUS SANTA FE: April - May 2000
“A Spiritual Connection to an Ancient Past”: The woven canvas art of Rachel Darnell combines the expressiveness of painting with the primitive structure of weaving.

	"Dusk Mystic" Oil & Leaf on Canvas 60" x 64" $12,400. SOLD
	"Dream Horizon II" Oil & 24k Gold Leaf on Canvas 46" x 84" $12,500.
	"Sunset Mystic" Oil & 24k Gold Leaf on Canvas 60" x 50" $10,500.
	"Dune Mystic" Oil On Canvas 40" x 40" $3,800.
	"Mars Mystic II" Oil & 24k Leaf on Canvas 84" x 16" $5,500.
	"Dream Horizon" Oil,White & Yellow Goldleaf on Canvas 51" x 72" $11,500.
	"Jade Mystic" Oil & 14k White Gold Leaf on Canvas 60" 12" $2,400.
	"Sun Spot" Oil on  Woven Canvas 30" x 34" $3,150.
	"Ochre" Oil on Woven Canvas 22" x 22" $1,450.
	"Mahogany Mystic" Oil & 14k White Goldleaf on Canvas 22" x 22" $1,450.   SOLD
	"You and Me" Oil & 24k GoldLeaf on Canvas 36" x 36' $3,940.

 

 

Jonathan Goodman

The Art of Rachel Darnell, November 2003

New York City

 

 

It is difficult today to speak of spiritual or beautiful things; however, the art of Rachel Darnell does exactly that.  Indeed, her materials themselves, including gold and silver leaf, reflect the belief that what is beautiful communicates itself in a surface of luxurious density, as well as engaging in a dialogue with the spiritual, or unseen.  While her art takes on the intricate patterns of adornment, the paintings themselves never fall to the level of mere decoration; instead, they reify, in the lush beauty of their surface, the artist’s concern with an art that reminds us of ancient brocades and textiles, materials that express the ancient desire to create a wealth of beauty in service of some higher, idealized understanding.  Darnell, a Judaic studies major as an undergraduate in college, looks for a statement that would be nearly doctrinal in its implications, were it not for the fact that she refuses to specify the terms of her ardor.  As a result, her paintings respond to pieties without specifically enacting them.  The result is an encompassing spirituality that gives of itself, enveloping the viewer with its warm and supple abstractions.

 

In Milagro I (2002), Darnell has literally woven the canvas together, covering it with 24-karat gold leaf and achieving a surface of remarkable physical attractiveness.  The piece is a magical extension of the exterior, a visionary textile in which the surface can stand for many things, including the intense pleasures of a private spirituality.  Darnell knows how to create a dialogue between viewer and object; here the effect is nearly that of bandaging--traces of reddish color peek through the diagonals of the woven canvas, as if there were, behind the sumptuous beauty presented to us, a deeper, more painful expression of self.  So it happens that the beauty of the surface is suffused with the suggestion of a rawer emotion, albeit one mediated by the artist’s obsession with an exquisite exterior.  Icon VI (2003), a vertical treatment (29 by 19 inches) of a glowing abstraction, in fact speaks to us as an icon might, with an awareness of the spirit not so much captured as fleetingly solicited for its evocation of prayer and rest.  The relatively narrow tower of gold and red, surrounded by a gold-leaf border, intimates a world of exquisite feeling, in which the spiritual life glows with possibility.

 

Sometimes the beauty is more art-historical than spiritual: The Lush Life (2002), another woven canvas, consists of blues and greens that remind us of the palette of Cezanne.  Silver leaf, instead of gold leaf, gives the work its lustrous intensity.  Darnell’s sense of color here is acute, given over to a statement of unusual power, as if color itself were capable of healing.  The effect of the layering produced by the woven strips of canvas intensifies the color scheme Darnell is using; it seems as though the colors are part of the weave of the canvas itself.  Referring to foliage and nature, The Lush Life shows that the artist does not remain indifferent to the world around her, that in fact she is interested in the relation of the visible, or objective, to the invisible, or nonobjective, in art.  Darnell is primarily involved, though, with the effect of decoration as it is indicative of a deeper awareness of the self; in Broken Tablet II (2001), a jagged vertical line on the left side of the painting both breaks up and calls attention to the gold leaf panel.  It is beautiful and at the same time faintly mysterious, like much of Darnell’s art.  It might well serve as a major example of just how far the artist is willing to go in pursuit of both beauty and truth.

 

 

Jonathan Goodman is an art writer and editor who has published extensively on modern and contemporary art for such publications as Art in America, Sculpture, Art Asia Pacific, and Art on Paper.  He is currently the reviews editor for Art Asia Pacific, and has written exhibition catalogues for art venues throughout the world.

 

 

 

 

Karen S. Chambers,

Risky Business:  The Sublime Paintings of Rachel Darnell,  November 2003, New York City

 

Rachel Darnell is playing in very dangerous aesthetic territory.  Her work is unabashedly

beautiful and her intentions perhaps a trifle too profound for today’s materialistic society.  Darnell’s paintings flirt with being too decorative with their layers of luminous oil paint, nearly hidden by sheets of gold leaf.  And she takes another risky step by weaving strips of canvas for the support of her luscious abstractions.  Of course canvas is woven, but Darnell’s thick strips boldly reveal that structure and she revels in the intertwining of the individual, vastly overscaled, “threads”.

 

For Darnell the use  of precious materials and the humble handcrafting convey a deeply felt spiritual message.  Representing the divine, gold has been used to decorate and elevate objects of devotion from ancient times in both Eastern and Western cultures.  Today that spiritual meaning has become secondary to one of a secular symbol of wealth, but not for Darnell.

 

The artists speaks frankly of the technique of weaving as symbolizing the interconnectedness  of humanity.  “We ae all interdependent”, she says.  “We are all part of the same thing.”  Darnell’s work has developed through a sequence of experiences.  Born in Quito, Ecuador, she is the daughter of American missionaries.  When she was four,  her family returned to its home base in Memphis, Tennessee.  Art has always been part of her family.  Her grandfather was an engineer and draftsman, one uncle an architect, another a marine biologist who illustrated his own books, her father a watercolorist, and both her parents art collectors.  Darnell attended  Saturday classes at the Memphis College of Art throughout grade school and junior high.

 

Before Darnell came to her vocation, she earned a BA in religion from Emory University in 1984.  Her focus was on Judaic Studies because of her desire to understand the roots of Christianity.  She spent a year in Jerusalem at Hebrew University, which gave her an opportunity to explore the ancient civilizations of Israel, Egypt and Greece.  Her studies led her “past theology” and to the realization that all cultures share a need for the spiritual.

 

It was then that Darnell was called to art.  In 1986 she enrolled at the Memphis College of Art and studied decorative design with a concentration in weaving.  However, weaving was not immediate enough nor could she achieve the complexity she sought. She began weaving strips of canvas and then gessoing and painting the surface.  Two years after graduating with a BFA in 1988, Darnell began to apply gold leaf to the woven support.

 

Although Darnell was not directly influenced by Olga de Amaral, an artist who Darnell admires, there is an undeniable connection between their work.  While their techniques are very different, both combine weaving, painting and metallic leaf in their works that verge on the sculptural.  (Darnell stretches her “weaving” over heavy bars and 2” x 2”s so that when they are installed on the wall, they stand away from it.)  And for both, gold is a symbol of the divine.

 

Darnell has now begun to create a more abstract structure and surface.  “Weaving is very symmetrical, and what I have to say is not symmetrical,” she explains.  “It is free flowing.”  The apparently random structure adds a more dynamic quality the reflects the world today.  Darnell’s purely nonobjective paintings have a physicality and presence that recall Russian Orthodox icons.  They are objects of contemplation, of devotion.

 

The spirituality that infuses Darnell’s  work can be related to the paintings of Mark Rothko, another artist she revers.  Her nuanced color and its luminosity do not imitate Rothko’s color-saturated canvas, but do elicit a similar response.  Darnell finds the Rothko Menil chapel in Houston inspiring, and she would like to create her own.  Her “monoliths”, tall rectangular canvases, evoke the human figure, and Darnell can envision a series of them creating a sanctuary.

 

In today’s secular society, Darnell dares to produce works of great beauty and spirituality that are simply sublime.

 

Karen S. Chambers is a freelance curator, editor, and  writer in New York City.  Her work has been included in such notable publications as American Ceramics, Art in America, American Craft and Glass.  Currently the editor-in chief of LDB Interior Textiles, Ms. Chambers previously served as the  editor of New Work, now Glass magazine, and executive editor for Craft International.