Rachel Bomze: Lyrics of String
“What’s in a mark? The process of painting lends itself to placing a trace or mark on the canvas and then reacting to that. As a process, I begin with a structure. There are no direct representational images in mind when I begin a painting, just the experience of placing marks on a page. I see painting as mark making, where my drawings become meshed into paintings. No longer in my mind is there a separation between the two. I am simply leaving a mark on the canvas.
I am constantly thinking about how a trace is a mark left behind by something that has passed. Upon closer inspection, there is immediacy in my work as seen through rubbings, printing and using textural elements. I think of these marks as a memory of what was used in making the marks, but not literally having the mark-maker in the piece itself. However, string has become that mark-maker which is directly referred to on the canvas, or indirectly through the string’s own path. Instead of simply making the mark in my paintings through a gestural line, the string has become that lyrical line that I can physically move around and leave it’s trace imbedded in the surface forever.”
– Rachel Bomze
Rachel Bomze, a painter originally from Texas, received her bachelor’s degree in Studio Art with an emphasis in Painting at Brandeis University, and her Master’s of Fine Arts in Painting from Tyler School of Art at Temple University. Bomze’s studio practice is centered on drawing, painting and printmaking. Her work centers on the in between spaces. This occurs in the work where imagery hovers between the process of painting itself and a recollection of an image. In those in-between places, sometimes the work is reminiscent of weaving. Many times the work recalls a landscape quality, like the light reflecting across the ripples in a body of water, or the sensation of being enveloped by a landscape space as if in a field or underwater.
Rachel’s work has been exhibited throughout the Pennsylvania and Southern New Jersey region, as well as in New York City.
