Painting has been a passion of mine since I was a child, but I didn’t focus on it full time until after I retired from the software industry in 2009. My paintings depict the natural world around me and the places where I’ve spent much of my life. That includes the Olympic Peninsula in the northwest corner of Washington state, Cape Cod, where my family has a home and where I've spent many summers since childhood and the northern Sierra foothills of California, where I lived prior to moving to Washington.
Painting enables me to see the world in a way no other activity provides. When constructing a composition, I leverage a mix of photographic references and direct observation. Once I’ve decided on the basic structure of the composition, I spend a great deal of time studying the subject matter in situ. If I am painting a landscape filled with trees, for example, I go out and study similar trees looking carefully at their overall form, how the light falls on the bark and the leaves as well as the shapes leaf clusters may take. I often go back and study objects again and again throughout the creative process and it is the visual education I receive as part of the painting experience that is one of my most favorite aspects of painting. I work exclusively with oil and acrylic mediums and provide prints on canvas of selected compositions.
Rachel Helm
Sequim, WA 2019
Painting enables me to see the world in a way no other activity provides. When constructing a composition, I leverage a mix of photographic references and direct observation. Once I’ve decided on the basic structure of the composition, I spend a great deal of time studying the subject matter in situ. If I am painting a landscape filled with trees, for example, I go out and study similar trees looking carefully at their overall form, how the light falls on the bark and the leaves as well as the shapes leaf clusters may take. I often go back and study objects again and again throughout the creative process and it is the visual education I receive as part of the painting experience that is one of my most favorite aspects of painting. I work exclusively with oil and acrylic mediums and provide prints on canvas of selected compositions.
Rachel Helm
Sequim, WA 2019