Raychael Stine

some notes on my work:

For the past 10 years or so I have been involved with wonder. In my painting practice, in the studio I dance, I sing, I cry, I laugh, I play, I try to turn off my rational brain and become fully embodied and in my senses. This transition definitely doesn't come easily. Its’ always a back and forth, but the feeling of being present in my body and senses, and not in my head, and particularly, the moment of recognition of that, is important. I try to make a picture of what that feels like. And of how certain feelings feel. Specifically what wonder, awe, might look like--and to embody and picture the transition to those feelings, whether they are small wonders, like sniffing a flower, or large wonders like recognizing the entire cosmos is inside of that tiny cosmos flower--and that its all made of love, and that love maybe looks like a dog.

I love thinking about joy, the human experience of it- which is not happiness—but comes from embodying, accepting, and moving through the traumas that have severed us from our souls, the transformation of those energies and experiences, so that we become our true connected selves. I try to follow my intuition and to do just want needs doing, as a dog would. My paintings are filled with this dancing between tiny and vast, deep and shallow, the luminous and the shadow, in and on, clarity and fogginess, buoyancy and levity and gravity and roundedness. It’s our natural human condition to embody a polarity between our brains and our bodies, the physical life and the inner life, the rational and the spiritual, between thinking and sensing, between control and freedom-- and it is in the grey space between these things where the root of what we are exists. I try to find a way to visually describe this. Different types of space and image, painterly approaches to representation and abstraction, and levels of legibility dance in out of each other, hover together, always moving, to come together into a moment of tenderness- an embrace, or a kiss, or an image, typically the profile of dog embedded in something that suggests a landscape. I think making motion and then stopping it- creating a painting that holds itself together, that plays with gravity and the lack of it, that plays with picture and with image, with something known and then moves through and beyond it, are primary values of mine as a painter.