Portrait and Figurative Painting

In 1992 I decided to choose an art form (painting) to hold back until my 50th birthday, suspecting that 25 years of longing might be something equal to charging a battery. In November of 2017 I began to paint.

“The paintings feels personal, and encoded, like Nirvana lyrics -
you don’t quite know what is going on, but somehow you get it.” - Luke Delalio

Self Portrait 12/1 14x18 on aluminum, oil

The Inexhaustible Now: Current work showing at Rio Bravo Fine Art Gallery, Truth or Consequences, New Mexico

Saturday March 13, 2021

The Inexhaustible Now

Featured in this show are eight new works in oil created by Wendy Tremayne painted during the period of lockdown that followed the onset of the COVID 19 pandemic. The show also features a number of previous painted figurative and portrait works, representations of conceptual art which includes video capture of on the street pieces developed and performed in New York City, and text and image from her book, The Good Life Lab: Radical Experiments in Hands-On Living (Storey 2013).

The paintings in The Inexhaustible Now portion of the show are paired with prose, written while painting, which she wrote to punctuate the sentiment of each piece. All of the work was approached as self inquiry. Processing new, complex, and never before experienced feelings brought on by the unprecedented experience of a global pandemic, the paintings reveal answers to a thread of inquiries such as, “What am I feeling and experiencing?” “Where am in now?” “What do I need to know and understand?” “How do I heal?” The answers produced this work of self-referential, narratives, personal and pointing to the subconscious.

Wendy’s work contains elements of magical realism. Like Frida Kahlo, she is often the subject featured in the paintings, as her process is one of self realization found and worked out on the canvas. Her influences include Ilya Zomb, George Tooker, Remedios Varos, and Bo Bartlet.

Final Piece in Series 24X30