Wet Leaves

About the Item: Rachel Burgess is a master of the monotype medium, her preferred method of translating landscapes to paper. The monotype is never a repeat. Nothing is carved into a plate, as with an etching. Instead, each image is painted onto plexiglass and exists for a finite moment before it is passed through a printing press and transferred onto BFK Rives paper. The artist uses brushes, rollers, Q-Tips and her hands to manipulate the oil based pigments. In the studio, Burgess works quite quickly, and each monotype is finished within one day so that the ink does not dry, adding a performative aspect to her approach. The final images become reversed through the printing process; thus, there is also a transformation—adding a further poetic layer to her methods.

Burgess primarily works in landscapes and seascapes. Her monotypes range in size from intimate squares to monumental diptychs and triptychs. These various scales will be present at SEFA Hudson in the exhibition Ingrained to showcase the variety and dynamism within the artist’s practice. In Autumn Day (2019), three panels of an abstracted landscape are coalesced into an immersive scene. The sunrise is rendered with light blues, soft yellows and blush pinks. The synchronicity in her color palette carries over throughout the triptych. Each of the three panels is striking individually and, together, create an atmosphere—a mood. Burgess’s landscapes seem to extend infinitely, generating similar effects as when one gazes into the horizon. Lines become forms; forms become colors; colors become memories: “perceptions of a fleeting moment.”

Such visual experiences encapsulate the natural wonders of the sky, sea and land. Yet, they also hint at the rich, interior reactions specific to each viewer. Indeed, for Burgess, many of her landscapes are based in Maine and depict the coastal areas that she remembers from childhood—notably the Piscataqua river. In the new series on view at SEFA Hudson, Burgess extends her locales to include additional places on the East Coast including Upstate New York. Inspired by Japanese woodblock prints, early Colonial folk art and New England Impressionism—she continues to simplify her forms into “crude but beautiful images.” Still, the priority is capturing the malleability of nature and the emotive potentials of our impressions while immersed by the worlds above, below and beyond our basic perception. As described by the artist, her works are “storytelling through the landscape.”