Marlene Rye received her A.B. in art at Smith College in 1993. From there she went on to earn an M.A. in art at Western Carolina University and an M.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. She has studied under distinguished artists such as Andrew Forge, Robert Godfrey, Barbara Grossman, John Moore, and Martha Armstrong. Currently she is showing her work nationally and has been accepted into juried shows with curators from the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim.

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General Teaching Philosophy

Often my students are interested in the question of what makes something real. This is a broad inquiry that can open one's mind to new ways of seeing the world. To see is to go beyond purely visual attributes. In my teaching I challenge students to see a subject's weight, its placement in space, how it feels, its temperature. Many students struggle with trying to record only visual information. My goal is to awaken a fascination with the prospect of trying to record the essence of something. One of my students summed up my philosophy well when she wrote in an evaluation, "She makes you work, not just on your drawings, but on yourself."

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Artist Statement

Travel in your mind back to a time as a child when you were in the ?wilderness?: backyard, vacant lot, roadside, field, or forest. Remember how the world looked as you crawled through the grass, each individual blade becoming a towering tree, rocks transformed into mountains. Visualize looking through the brambles and thickets of your backyard and feeling the enormity of that space juxtaposed with the closeness of the surrounding branches. See a field, feel the openness of the air and the closeness of the warm ground beneath, expanding and contracting the space at the same time. These sensations are at the heart of my work.

Through painting I explore the idea of what wilderness feels like. Seldom do we slow down or use our senses fully enough to really experience nature. Take a stroll into these paintings, feel the color with your hands, breathe in the rich vividness. Journey slowly, letting the leaves brush against your body, notice the fragrance of purple flowers underfoot. Revel in the freshness of spring and celebrate the crispness of autumn. Dance with the trees as they stretch through the space, winding like ribbons in the wind.

Through use of color and line I attempt to depict not just images or scenes of nature but rather evoke feelings and emotion of a place. My mark making and palette is combined with layering, glazing, and a scratching away of the paint. What emerges is a portrait of a place over time. Light in the work is oftentimes multidirectional and the space is at once open and airy, then close and confining. Contrast is often present at times, yet space is sometimes seen through use of color alone. The overall effect is akin to a voyage through and into a place, not just a peek at or a visit to nature.

Whether I am painting large or tiny, I seek to create intimate worlds with a feeling of immensity. This vastness doesn?t necessarily manifest itself in the form of deep space, but rather a feeling of expansion inside oneself when looking at the work.