Painter of Darkness and Light By Amy L. Young Photo: Brandon Sullivan 8 JAVA MAGAZINE
I first met artist Rachel Bess at the end of 2003, when my partner Douglas Grant (who passed away earlier this year) and I moved from New York to downtown Phoenix’s Grand Avenue to open Perihelion Arts. Rachel had a studio down the street that she shared with Karolina Sussland. The pair dropped by unexpectedly, just a few days after we had briefly invaded their building’s shower facilities; we shared a landlord, and our own bathroom was still under construction. A couple of days later, we found the pair peeking in our side door as we unloaded some boxes that had arrived after us. Eventually, we would come to work with Rachel for several years, as we found her work exciting and shared many of the same ideas about art and business, along with several personal interests. We exhibited her paintings and drawings in Phoenix, as well as around the United States and Europe, and never failed to be impressed by her evolution. Around the time of those initial meetings, it certainly wasn’t a surprise that local artists would be interested in finding out what a couple of new-to-theneighborhood gallery owners were up to by popping by for a peek. But as I grew to know Rachel, it became apparent that her curiosity was both inherent and tenacious—the kind that impresses you and challenges you, simultaneously. Everything with Rachel is on a need-to-know basis, as in: she needs to know. That continuous journey to the core of everything she engages with, topped off by an excruciating desire to excel, is exemplified in her extremely detailed oil paintings. The path to becoming an artist was one Bess jumped on at a pretty early age. “I knew by college that I was going to try my hardest to make my living as an artist,” she says. “I started college at 16 (she is an ASU graduate) and had my art degree mapped out at that point. During my first semester, I sold a little linoleum print to a friend for $15, and that’s when it really clicked that it would be possible to pay bills doing this and that things could be okay.” She adds that the small sale paid her pager bill for two months. That technically wasn’t her first art sale— when she was a little kid, she sold Halloween drawings from a table in her front yard for a nickel a pop, adding humorously, “my prices have been steadily increasing since.” Her determined nature helped her stay rooted in that choice, despite its obvious potential for pitfalls. “One of the hardest things about deciding that you want to be an artist,” Rachel says, “is that everyone knows how unlikely success is, so there are so many people that worry about you. People second-guess you and generally try to persuade you to do something that is perceived as safer. I chose not to apply to grad schools and instead save that money, or rather prevent having that debt, and live inexpensively and focus on making artwork.” Bess’ work is produced through traditional techniques, and the processes are time intensive; she averages about 100 hours per painting, and her recent works are modest in size, anywhere from 5” x 7” to 11” x 14”, further highlighting the attention lavished on each painting. The ways they engage you are numerous. The skill is undeniable; viewers add an external layer to the motion and flow of the work as their own eyes follow each impeccable detail to the next. Rachel’s body of work is largely comprised of human portraiture, mostly women, though the mix is peppered by some paintings of men. Sometimes the subjects are in interesting scenarios, but generally they are alone, surrounded by objects that help make them more unique; in one case that could be ghosts, in another, like “Shattered Heart,” it may be shards of a delicate stained glass strewn atop the body of a sullen, beautiful girl. Bess is selective in her choice of models, as she sees each finished piece as self-reflective—a version of self-portraiture. “The people I use to model are complicated people. As a chaotic person, I gravitate toward those who are similar. I can tell there’s more beneath the surface, and that’s what I am interested in capturing.” For instance, she focuses often on hands, saying that they give cues and also offer clues about what a person is thinking. She is interested in seeing and highlighting the vulnerabilities that reveal themselves, sometimes more subtly than others, and allowing those to become natural focal points. When your paintings include a dark, rich palette and items that are related to decay, like skulls or extracted teeth, people tend to assume you have a death obsession. Bess, who definitely has a love for all things Goth, doesn’t deny that, but it’s truly the entire life cycle that continually fascinates her. “The overarching theme of my work has always been impermanence,” she tells me. “The natural order is for things to grow and dissolve. What is left when that happens? When things die or are destroyed, what remains?” JAVA 9 MAGAZINE
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