People & Places: Tracey Adams, Sarah Rehmer & Joanna Kidney
We continue our series on "People & Places" this week with a group of exceptional artists from the West, Midwest, and abroad. We begin in the West, where we are uplifted by Tracey Adams’ wandering and seemingly effortless line-work and color command, Tracey lives and works in California. In the Midwest, Sarah Rehmer is an artist and educator who teaches regional R&F workshops at La Grange Art Center outside of Chicago. Process is paramount throughout her practice. Finally, Joanna Kidney lives and works in Ireland. Her work is patiently organized and has a captivating weightless quality.
TRACEY ADAMS / WEST
A 2016 recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, Tracey Adams has been an exhibiting artist for over 35 years. She has participated in over 175 solo and group exhibitions domestically and internationally. Adams’ paintings are included in the permanent collections of many museums throughout the United States. Her lifelong interests – music, science, mathematics, and art – are constantly woven and re-woven into her paintings and works on paper. Because of her background as a musician, a strong feeling for musical metaphors can be seen in her work. Visual intervals and patterns appear, and physical engagement and a sense of performance is always part of her studio practice.
"I have known Richard Frumess since 1995 and took an encaustic workshop with Cynthia Winika in 1997. I have worked with ALL of your products faithfully since then."
SARAH REHMER / MIDWEST
Sarah Rehmer was born and raised in the western suburbs of Chicago, where she still resides. In 2003, Rehmer earned her BA in Graphic Design and Photography from Dominican University in River Forest, IL. She found her love for working with pages from old books while auditing a class post-graduation at the university. The use of vintage books and book pages has remained a central theme in Sarah’s work for the last 17 years, mainly as a metaphor for memory, and more specifically memories that have been lost due to afflictions such as dementia and Alzheimer’s. This is Sarah’s 11th year teaching classes and workshops around the Midwest, and we are very grateful to have Sarah as one of our R&F Regional Instructors.
“I began working with R&F materials back in 2004 when I was starting to make the cross over from more traditional collage materials and R&F was what I could find in person at the Pearl Paints that used to be in the River North district of Chicago. As a beginner, being able to see the colors in person and the intensity of them before just ordering some was what really got me excited to start experimenting. R&F’s support of both their instructors and the greater community working in encaustic is one of the many reasons it is the main brand I use."
JOANNA KIDNEY / IRELAND
Joanna Kidney is a visual artist born in Dublin and currently living in Co. Wicklow, Ireland. Her practice is a continual enquiry of an abstract vocabulary through drawing, painting, and installation. On a quest for the non-material, it attempts to reflect on our place within the complex, infinite universe. She has exhibited widely in solo and group shows in Ireland, France, Germany, and the United States.
"I began working with beeswax in 2001, using it as a ground and layering it transparently as part of mixed media drawings. Encaustic is a rare medium in Ireland so it took me several years to find my way to working with traditional encaustic paint. I choose it because of its shared characteristics with drawing - its immediacy, mark-making, subtraction. Its material qualities (translucency, physicality, malleability, brutality, sensuality and luminosity) continue to intrigue me.
Doing a Colour Theory workshop with Richard Frumess at the International Encaustic Conference last year was fantastic for developing a more conscious relationship with opaque and transparent pigments. I incise a lot into the surface and find pigment sticks are the best and most convenient medium for filling the incisions. Working with R&F materials in the workshops I give has been a wonderful way to develop my relationship with the R&F range and to help spread the good word this side of the Atlantic!"