Rebecca Stahr

Rebecca Stahr is a visual artist living with her husband and son in conservation community surrounded by the beautiful native prairie of northern Illinois. Rebecca attended the American Academy of Art in Chicago, studying advertising, graphic design and illustration, where she graduated in 1992. After more than 20 years of working in the commercial art field, Rebecca is now a full time artist. She is a member of various professional organizations and has work displayed in many private collections and public gallery spaces. Rebecca's recent encaustic paintings merge an interest in process and the encaustic medium with an organic, almost three dimensional approach to developing a composition. Images that seem to reference nature are the accumulation of thousands of little points of pigmented wax applied in layers. The image seems to simultaneously form and dissolve, and speaks to the mutable and atomically fractured nature of our physical environment. With a technique that recalls the repetitive creation of weaving and textiles, Stahr creates images that can be read both as surface and image. Says Rebecca about her work: "My paintings often feel like imagined emotional inner landscapes. They are born out of a larger contemplative practice rooted in experiencing the sacred connectedness in our natural world, the beauty of impermanence and the cycles of life and nature. The paintings becomes a record of that journey and as well as a path of healing and deeper understanding of the beauty of humanity's imperfection.