Rachel Steely : Indianapolis Fine Art Artist : Art Class Instructor for Painting, Photography » time

Fragility of Life in Patterns in Flight

Rachel — Tue, 17 May 2011 17:50:38 +0000

Life is fragile. This tenuous state is particularly evident in the smaller living creatures around us. When I first decided to use butterflies as my subjects for a painting series, I ordered 12 Painted Lady larvae from a science company. It was November, and I wanted to have a physical reference to work from as well as to study the life cycle of the subject. Of the 12 larvae that arrived, 10 survived to enter the cocoon and 8 survived the cocoon and became butterflies. By the end of the first month, I had around 5 butterflies, 2 of which survived three months. (Which is longer than their estimated life span). This fragility of life makes the butterfly stage more beautiful and precious. The butterfly is a testimony to survival.

Movement, Trams, Amsterdam

Rachel — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:00:24 +0000

Reflections, time, and speed are ideas that I am interested in that are elements in this photograph. I saw the idea behind this image on my first day in the Netherlands last autumn. I decided to attempt to capture this photograph the next time I saw it. A few days later, I spent time waiting, watching, and shooting before events fell into place in order to obtain this result. It is a picture of a young woman standing in front of a tram. The tram passes by and she waits. Perhaps the image would be better technically if someone had posed standing absolutely still, but this is a slice of busy life in a city. This is life as it happens.

Speed of Time

Rachel — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:00:15 +0000

I remember more then one science video that I watched as a child having a scene where something that took months to occur would be shown in a minute’s time. Technology allowed us to see changes that occurred slowly, quickly. For example, a plant would grow out of the ground, bud, a flower would open up and die all in the same minute. It was fascinating because it was something that one could not experience in nature.
How do my paintings treat speed? Well, in Foreshadowing, paintings of flowers, time travels faster then the speed of nature. In Patterns in Flight, butterfly wing paintings, and in Action, Unification, paintings of joints of bones, I am slowing down time. There are beautiful things that happen so fast that our naked eye can not capture them. These objects have a rhythm that is too fast for us to normally comprehend.

I also try to take the stages, freeze them in time, and layer them. We easily forget where we have been before. One can see the different stages of the flower, butterfly wings, or joint of bones in the same painting.