|
February 11, 2005
Section: Preview
Page: 04E
EXPOSURE
Jennifer Flowers
Staff
Times=City
Seeing emotion: Artist uses color to
convey feelings | |
| By Jennifer Flowers
jenniferflowers@gannett.com
Some mornings, Rachel Stuart-Haas wakes up to a
color craving.
If it's a red day, the artist wants to paint something voluptuous and
sexy. On blue or green days, she knows she'll come up with something more
ruminative and inward.
Stuart-Haas, whose paintings parade bright colors and
feminine forms, likes to keep her process at an intuitive level, succumbing to
line and color to distill an emotion in her imagery.
And her process makes sense, given that her emotional-realism painting
style tries to isolate fragments of feminine vulnerability using female subjects
and abstract shapes.
Stuart-Haas, 28, is a Shreveport native who studied art at
the Kansas City Art Institute and is represented at the Blue Gallery in Kansas
City, Mo.
Showing regionally, Stuart-Haas will exhibit her work at
the Montessori Art Exhibition in Shreveport on March 5 and also will show at the
Southside Gallery in Oxford, Miss., from May 16 to June 18. "Wayward
Delinquents," her Houston-based show, closed at the Commerce Street Artists'
Warehouse on Feb. 5.
After spending a couple of years in New York City where she fulfilled a
dream publishing an illustration in The New Yorker, she returned to Kansas City
and opened her own art gallery. Stuart-Haas moved back to
Shreveport in April with her husband and now focuses full time on her artwork.
QUESTION: How long have you worked in your current style?
ANSWER: It has been that way since probably the end of my senior year in
college. When I moved to New York, because you have such small quarters,
everything got super tiny and I literally had pieces that were like 12 inches.
When I moved back to Kansas City I started a gallery with my friends and we
named it the Green Door Gallery -- it was a huge space so I was able to do
70-inch paintings. My style was consistent but it got much larger and the colors
got brighter, and I think it had to do with the space issues.
Q: Why do you paint women?
A: I rarely ever paint men anymore and I think that's just because I'm
not a man. I'm a woman and it's easier for me to relate to that. I use a lot of
feminine imagery, such as circles or things that kind of relate to women,
whatever that may be. It's not so much a conscious effort. That's my experience,
so that's why I paint that way.
Q: What are you trying to say?
A: If you're sitting there and you're really upset about something and
someone walks past you and you make eye contact, you feel exposed and
embarrassed and are really vulnerable. I try to paint that exact moment.
Q: Tell me about the woman you frequently use in your paintings.
A: I found her when I was forming my senior thesis in college. I was
really into an artist by the name of Jan Toorop, and I really liked Aubrey
Beardsley. They have a lot of these big-eyed women in their work and I was just
inspired by that. ... I love to paint people and I love to paint women, so she
just kind of pops up, but I never really refer to her as anything. I just call
her my girl.
Q: Tell me about getting into The New Yorker.
A: I just really decided in my head that I'm going to get into The New
Yorker, and that's going to be my big thing in New York. So I just went every
single day and I really bothered them. And finally they called me and they were
like, OK, we're going to put in a piece.
Q: What did they run?
A: I did the illustration of Catherine Zeta-Zones for the movie "The
Haunting" that published in 1999.
Q: Do you ever miss the fast-paced cultural mecca of New York?
A: I love it and I'd love to go back, but living there is a different
thing -- I find more humor in Shreveport -- and not in a bad way -- than I do in
New York. Everybody in New York is so me-focused and they're only out for
themselves. As you're walking down the street, nobody says anything. In
Shreveport people will just strike up conversations and talk to you, and you get
ideas from that.
|
| |
|
Copyright (c) The Times. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of
Gannett Co., Inc. by NewsBank, inc.
| |
R a c h e l S t u a r t – H a a s
rstuart-haas@sport.rr.com
Biography
Studied painting at the Marchutz School
in Aix en Provence, France
BFA in Design at the Kansas City Art
Institute
Artist’s Assistance for artist Brad
Holland
One of the founding members of Green
Door Gallery, Kansas City, MO
Artist configuration
A woman’s perspective is the common
thread within Rachel Stuart-Haas’ work. Her silent figures embody a
vision of the paradoxical relationship between aesthetic beauty and emotional
discomfort. A viewer is shown a single
moment of feminine realism where fragmented emotion is represented in
Stuart-Haas’ broad, bright colors.
Rachel
Stuart-Haas’ figures represent some of the artist’s personal experiences,
insecurities, and attitudes toward the challenges of being a woman in today’s
world. These female subjects are often
depicted in a moment where they are forced to view themselves without the
protection of vanity, adoration, or other such trappings of an insecure
existence.
Exhibitions
1998 Group Show | Proxemics | Kansas
City MO
2000 Two Woman Show | Exaggeration |
Niva Gallery | New York NY
2000 Group Show | Bush Gallery |
Providence Rhode Island
2000
Group Show | Behind The Green Door | Green Door Gallery | Kansas City MO
2001 Group Show | Infect | Green Door
Gallery | Kansas City MO
2001 Two Women Show | The Framing Girl
| Kansas City MO
2002 Group Show | Blue Gallery | Kansas
City MO
2002 Group Show | The Cube at Beco |
Kansas City MO
2003 Group Show | LightBox Gallery |
Kansas City MO
2003 Group Show | Kansas City Jewish
Musuem | Kansas City MO
2003 Two Person Show | Personal
Universe | Blue Gallery | Kansas City MO
2003
Group Show | She Loves Me/She Loves Me Not | Olive Gallery | Lawrence KS
2002 to current | Represented by Blue
Gallery
|
