Renata Lucia

I am striving to shift aesthetics to a wilder landscape, inspire wonder, and encourage local ecosystem conservation. As an artist, naturalist, and environmental advocate, my practice is rooted in regular engagement with my environment through plein air studies, volunteer work for local nonprofit organizations, naturalist excursions, and ecological study.

CAN'T SEE THE FOREST EXHIBITION
 “Can’t See the Forest” is an exhibition of ecological drawings, printing plates, and collagraphs that are equal parts warning, love letter, and documentation delivered in trees.  The title is borrowed from the phrase “can’t see the forest for the trees,” to highlight how focusing on the wrong details can lead to failure to notice what’s important as an ecological whole. 

My “Wildwoods” series features tree portraits from those interactions in Houston neighborhoods, Texas State Parks (including the now lost Fairfield Lake State Park), and the Russell Farm Art Center in North Texas. The images emphasize an ecologically important but overlooked microhabitat within the trees - tree holes and hollows. In an urban setting, trees and branches with holes are often removed for aesthetic purposes, but this natural stage of tree life and death reverberates through the environment and would benefit us all if those that can remain safely are left wild and undisturbed. 

My “Sylvan Transformations” collagraph series forefronts disturbance, featuring trees transformed to ubiquitous packaging materials, to collagraph printing plates, and then framed images on paper. The prints are created by carving tree imagery into flattened packaging (such as unfolded printer cartridge or pasta boxes) to create printing plates that are intaglio printed or viscosity printed (multi-color printing that incorporates relief and intaglio techniques). The imagery includes healthy trees and snags, deformed urban trees, wooden power poles (former trees), microhabitats, and consequences of habitat loss. Sunsets depicted in the viscosity prints offer both end-of-day comfort and warning of impeding climate crisis. The printing plates are also presented to highlight the materiality and presence of the trees, and clarify the printing process.

NEWS VS NATURE SERIES:
The News vs. Nature paintings reflect the widening social divides that unfold in the current news cycle. I began the series in 2011, envisioning the organized chaos of nature reigning supreme against the psychological toll of bad news. The series was featured in “New American Paintings” that year, and then I put it aside for other projects. I felt compelled to start these again in 2017, but the series shifted and took on new importance in late 2017 as an epic battle began to rage with our perception and discussion of the news. Now it’s harder to tell who to root for. Is the news fake or, more likely, a last bastion of truth? Is nature sublime, or does it represent the most disturbing aspects of human nature. I don’t know anymore, and the battle rages on. 

The encaustic "quilts" of my Vintage series weave together indexical remnants of an unknown person, whose life was documented in a small found photo album from Southwest Houston.   Due to the iconically vintage nature of some of the photos - with bouffant hairdos, yellow plastic lawn chairs, and go-go boots - I don't think the album owner is alive. By using her images though, I feel that her memories, treasures, and loves are reanimated in a sense, in an echo of an echo. I employ quilt pattern language to piece the images together:   cathedral windows, for the glimpses into the moments that build a life; ocean waves, for the cyclical nature of families; grandmother's flowers, for a mother's hopes. These personal images will never occur again in their particularity, but I think the knowledge that they will repeated in other similar forms over and over again taps in to the universal pattern of life. I find some comfort there and, like my quilting relatives before me, I celebrate these events with my work. Titles for this series have been pulled from lines of a William Blake poem, The Ecchoing Green, as I have given much thought to innocence and experience while making these works: REDWORK:  CONGRESSIONAL PENNY SQUARES SERIES:
My ongoing series of embroidered congressional districts are documentation of absurd gerrymandering, preservation of an obscure needlework/quilting medium, and commentary through a historically loaded medium. In this usage, “Redwork” becomes a double entendre for present day political machinations as well as specific style of embroidery.  Redwork originated in the lower to middle classes in Europe and America due to the common nature of the materials (as opposed to fine fabrics and silk threads), the minimal use of thread, and an easy technique, all of which made it affordable and accessible, Growth of the technique in America was also attributed to the weaker economy following the depression. During the 1860s-1930s women also did not have many ways to voice their concerns or political views but penny squares often addressed these issues. Penny squares were ready-to-stich redwork blocks on muslin, which were sold in general stores, to be assembled into quilts. I find these references to specific classes, commerce, economics, and social commentary startlingly relevant to the present day.