Up and Away
Rebecca Tremont
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Dear Rebecca,
How did you start your artistic journey? My mom. I’ve actually never mentioned this to her. My mom, she did these abstract Cubist, almost Kandinsky inspired art pieces in brightly colored pastels and pencils. I would find them hidden around our apartment and would sneak looks at them when she wasn’t around. I would stare at them, study the sweeping curves and bold lines. My young brain trying to figure out, place a name, on what they meant. There was some secret emotion about them that sucked me in and first introduced me to the emotion behind art. After that I was hooked. My mom’s drawings had opened up a whole new world to me. I wanted to explore, delve into this secret world. I rarely ever showed anyone my artwork. It’s been until a little less than two years ago that I first started sharing my artwork. |
Photo: courtesy of the artist |
What are some essential characteristics of your artwork?
The only colors I mix on my pallet are unbleached titanium white and my special mix of black acrylic paint and Higgins ink. All other colors are applied to my canvas in their pure form and layered either through scumbling, or many thin glazes, to achieve a specific look or color. This can give some of my paintings a 3D look in the correct lighting and angle and or adds a raw unfinished look to many of them.
Some pieces I will finish in a day and other pieces will take several months depending on the amount of layers and depth. Once I am done painting the piece, I will let it sit for a few days, and then go over it with a pen or marker and sketch the final details on top of it, and outline any forms that I want to highlight.
What is the best professional advice you have received so far and how has it affected your career?
The best advice I've been given so far would have to be, “If you are afraid to paint something, than that is the very thing that you must paint”, and “embrace rejection.”
Very recently, I started a series of paintings about a woman, I currently have four in progress right now, and it's something I was terrified to paint for quite a while. Yet once I started creating the thing I feared, a door opened and all this internal creative stuff started flooding out.
If you are afraid to create something, then there's a reason behind your fears, and unlocking that door could lead to great creative potential and growth as an artist and as a person.
Learning to embrace rejection is a difficult one. One that takes time and practice. As an artist you need to build up a thick skin when it comes to rejection. You will get rejected many times over. Words will be spoken about your artwork that will make your heart break, and make you want to give up. Not everyone will like what you do, maybe only small group will even appreciate it. But you must keep going, because for someone who is truly an artist, whatever your medium, the urge to create never goes away. It’s burned into your blood. If you don’t face that rejection, and keep pushing forward, you will always regret it. I wasted many years being afraid of rejection, years that I regret wasting, but that is also motivation not to waste my future years.
The only colors I mix on my pallet are unbleached titanium white and my special mix of black acrylic paint and Higgins ink. All other colors are applied to my canvas in their pure form and layered either through scumbling, or many thin glazes, to achieve a specific look or color. This can give some of my paintings a 3D look in the correct lighting and angle and or adds a raw unfinished look to many of them.
Some pieces I will finish in a day and other pieces will take several months depending on the amount of layers and depth. Once I am done painting the piece, I will let it sit for a few days, and then go over it with a pen or marker and sketch the final details on top of it, and outline any forms that I want to highlight.
What is the best professional advice you have received so far and how has it affected your career?
The best advice I've been given so far would have to be, “If you are afraid to paint something, than that is the very thing that you must paint”, and “embrace rejection.”
Very recently, I started a series of paintings about a woman, I currently have four in progress right now, and it's something I was terrified to paint for quite a while. Yet once I started creating the thing I feared, a door opened and all this internal creative stuff started flooding out.
If you are afraid to create something, then there's a reason behind your fears, and unlocking that door could lead to great creative potential and growth as an artist and as a person.
Learning to embrace rejection is a difficult one. One that takes time and practice. As an artist you need to build up a thick skin when it comes to rejection. You will get rejected many times over. Words will be spoken about your artwork that will make your heart break, and make you want to give up. Not everyone will like what you do, maybe only small group will even appreciate it. But you must keep going, because for someone who is truly an artist, whatever your medium, the urge to create never goes away. It’s burned into your blood. If you don’t face that rejection, and keep pushing forward, you will always regret it. I wasted many years being afraid of rejection, years that I regret wasting, but that is also motivation not to waste my future years.
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Alaska is your home turf. Do the amazing scenery and pristine nature there inspire and help you pick the color palette for your paintings?
Yes. Alaska is a wild and raw place. Full of vibrant wildlife, and breathtaking sunsets and sunrises. Most of my paintings of animals and scenery are brilliantly colored will a raw quality that is shaped by where I grew up, where I live. That could be the reason why I love using raw unmixed colors in my paintings, a way to capture the untamed vibrancy of the world around me.
How do you feel about social media and what’s the impact it has on your life as an artist?
Alaska, my life, is pretty isolated and social media is an invaluable asset to me as an artist. Granted, as a severe introvert and occasional hermit, social media is creature that I am still awkwardly stumbling my way through learning to navigate. Through it, I have been able to share my artwork with people from all over the world. I would never have been able to accomplish that otherwise. Yet most importantly, I have been greatly inspired by the people I’ve meet on social media. By their art, by their stories, and by their lives. The advice and knowledge that I have gleaned is invaluable.
Do you have a bucket list that involves your creative output?
I do have a bucket list. However, some of the things on it would seem absolutely ridiculous to most people and are things that I am, at least right now, still too shy to share. But I believe it's important to have an outrageous bucket list when it comes to creativity. Something huge to help drive you forward.
There are a few things on the list that I am right now comfortable enough to share. One being that I would like to illustrate and write a series of children's books. Bill Peet was my favorite author as a very young child. I loved the bright illustrations and how they looked like they were sketched onto each page of every book. As if you could touch them and smear the drawing. I would love to one day create books like that.
Another thing on my bucket list would be to one day teach art classes at a community center or after school program. Help teach the next generation of young artist the tools to turn their imaginations into reality.
Many of your paintings center on a woman’s image and her complex universe. Why so?
Those paintings, rather series of paintings that I am currently exploring, I fought painting for over a year. I was afraid to paint, to delve into that part of me. Until about two and a half years ago I was in a pretty bad place. I had been in a horribly toxic relationship for years, I barely slept, had stopped eating except for coffee and cigarettes, and hadn’t been able to paint for about four years. I had dropped a scary amount of weight, and in less that five months, had gone from a size 10 to a size 1 at my smallest. I would get on the bus in the morning to go to work and fantasize about what it would be like to just stay on the bus till to the last stop, and then just start walking until I disappeared from the face of the earth. I didn’t want to die per se, I just wanted to vanish, for the nightmare to end. I had completely lost who I was.
I finally got myself free of that situation a few years ago and about two years ago, started painting again. Those paintings of those women are me. They don’t look like me, but they represent me. What I went through learning and rebuilding my life. What I went through learning to live again. As afraid as I was to start that series of paintings, because of how personal they would be, and how personal they will continue to be, now I can’t seem to stop painting them. I am just along for the ride to see how it ends.
How do you feel about the ongoing movements focused on empowering woman?
I believe it’s about time. I think it’s wonderful and inspiring that more and more women are stepping forward. Fighting to make our voices heard. But there is a serious problem that I see in the women's empowerment movement. America is a vastly racially and ethnically diverse country. Yet many, entire groups, of these women and transgender women, are cut out of the movement.
Strong, powerful and intelligent women, whose stories, hardships, daily struggles, and strengths need to be told and heard. I believe that until that happens, until every woman's voice is heard and included in the movement, the women's empowerment movement will remain divided and will not be as strong as it needs to be to impact lasting change.
What is the change you want to see as a female artist and how do you think it can be achieved?
I would like to see more women artists in the forefront of whatever their field of art may be. I would like to see more women represented in the arts. More women in the forefront of the sciences, and more women entrepreneurs. I think that to change this though, it must be started at a young age. That phrases along the lines of, “you can’t do that, you're a girl”, or “proper ladies don’t behave like that”, need to be erased. Phrases like that crush dreams; they crush the urge to fight for what you want, to make your imagination a future reality.
What makes you hopeful about what lies ahead?
People. People make me hopeful about what lies ahead. The news and social media tend to focus on the violence and hate happening in the world. It's what sells, what gets clicks. But for every horrible thing that happens, there are always people out there, good people, as most people are at their core, doing what they can to help. Stepping forward, saving lives, helping strangers, and fighting for change.
If you look at history, when things get horrible, and seem at their worst, people always step forward. People, flawed complex creatures that we are, give me hope.
Yes. Alaska is a wild and raw place. Full of vibrant wildlife, and breathtaking sunsets and sunrises. Most of my paintings of animals and scenery are brilliantly colored will a raw quality that is shaped by where I grew up, where I live. That could be the reason why I love using raw unmixed colors in my paintings, a way to capture the untamed vibrancy of the world around me.
How do you feel about social media and what’s the impact it has on your life as an artist?
Alaska, my life, is pretty isolated and social media is an invaluable asset to me as an artist. Granted, as a severe introvert and occasional hermit, social media is creature that I am still awkwardly stumbling my way through learning to navigate. Through it, I have been able to share my artwork with people from all over the world. I would never have been able to accomplish that otherwise. Yet most importantly, I have been greatly inspired by the people I’ve meet on social media. By their art, by their stories, and by their lives. The advice and knowledge that I have gleaned is invaluable.
Do you have a bucket list that involves your creative output?
I do have a bucket list. However, some of the things on it would seem absolutely ridiculous to most people and are things that I am, at least right now, still too shy to share. But I believe it's important to have an outrageous bucket list when it comes to creativity. Something huge to help drive you forward.
There are a few things on the list that I am right now comfortable enough to share. One being that I would like to illustrate and write a series of children's books. Bill Peet was my favorite author as a very young child. I loved the bright illustrations and how they looked like they were sketched onto each page of every book. As if you could touch them and smear the drawing. I would love to one day create books like that.
Another thing on my bucket list would be to one day teach art classes at a community center or after school program. Help teach the next generation of young artist the tools to turn their imaginations into reality.
Many of your paintings center on a woman’s image and her complex universe. Why so?
Those paintings, rather series of paintings that I am currently exploring, I fought painting for over a year. I was afraid to paint, to delve into that part of me. Until about two and a half years ago I was in a pretty bad place. I had been in a horribly toxic relationship for years, I barely slept, had stopped eating except for coffee and cigarettes, and hadn’t been able to paint for about four years. I had dropped a scary amount of weight, and in less that five months, had gone from a size 10 to a size 1 at my smallest. I would get on the bus in the morning to go to work and fantasize about what it would be like to just stay on the bus till to the last stop, and then just start walking until I disappeared from the face of the earth. I didn’t want to die per se, I just wanted to vanish, for the nightmare to end. I had completely lost who I was.
I finally got myself free of that situation a few years ago and about two years ago, started painting again. Those paintings of those women are me. They don’t look like me, but they represent me. What I went through learning and rebuilding my life. What I went through learning to live again. As afraid as I was to start that series of paintings, because of how personal they would be, and how personal they will continue to be, now I can’t seem to stop painting them. I am just along for the ride to see how it ends.
How do you feel about the ongoing movements focused on empowering woman?
I believe it’s about time. I think it’s wonderful and inspiring that more and more women are stepping forward. Fighting to make our voices heard. But there is a serious problem that I see in the women's empowerment movement. America is a vastly racially and ethnically diverse country. Yet many, entire groups, of these women and transgender women, are cut out of the movement.
Strong, powerful and intelligent women, whose stories, hardships, daily struggles, and strengths need to be told and heard. I believe that until that happens, until every woman's voice is heard and included in the movement, the women's empowerment movement will remain divided and will not be as strong as it needs to be to impact lasting change.
What is the change you want to see as a female artist and how do you think it can be achieved?
I would like to see more women artists in the forefront of whatever their field of art may be. I would like to see more women represented in the arts. More women in the forefront of the sciences, and more women entrepreneurs. I think that to change this though, it must be started at a young age. That phrases along the lines of, “you can’t do that, you're a girl”, or “proper ladies don’t behave like that”, need to be erased. Phrases like that crush dreams; they crush the urge to fight for what you want, to make your imagination a future reality.
What makes you hopeful about what lies ahead?
People. People make me hopeful about what lies ahead. The news and social media tend to focus on the violence and hate happening in the world. It's what sells, what gets clicks. But for every horrible thing that happens, there are always people out there, good people, as most people are at their core, doing what they can to help. Stepping forward, saving lives, helping strangers, and fighting for change.
If you look at history, when things get horrible, and seem at their worst, people always step forward. People, flawed complex creatures that we are, give me hope.