Renée Bouchard was awarded the Pollock-Krasner grant and the Puffin Foundation grant in 2023 after receiving an MFA in visual art from the Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2021. Her upcoming exhibitions are “Painting at Night” at Opalka Gallery at Russell Sage College in Albany, NY in September 2024 and “Down the Rabbit Hole” at Lights Out Gallery in Norway, ME beginning in July and running through December 2024.
She is currently an artist-in-residence at Collar Works and Chashama in Troy, NY. Other awards include: the Vermont Individual Artist Grant and the Power of Art Grant for teaching art to students with Learning Disabilities from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Bouchard’s solo exhibitions include: Kaleidoscopic Pathos, at the Vermont State House's Governor's Gallery, We The People, at Southern Vermont College, and Allegory of Prudence, at the LA Arts Center. Other exhibitions and lectures were held at the Lyman Allyn Museum, Bennington Museum, Union College, University of Maine; Augusta, Connecticut College, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts: Gallery 51, University of Massachusetts; Amherst, University of Southern Maine, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, and the ICA at Maine College of Art & Design.
She has been an artist-in-residence at Artspace New Haven, the Vermont Studio Center, the Cooper Union and the Kate Millett Art Colony for Women. She received her BFA in painting, with honors, from the Maine College of Art in 1999.
She is a volunteer advocate/counselor for the Project Against Violent Encounters in Vermont and New York.
"Escaping the confines of one reality and entering an alternate reality is often where I find meaning within the complexity of the mind and the emotions it houses. My work is an ongoing question: how to build a common world when the one we inhabit I oppose. I intersect working from observation with exploring internal spaces like memory, tracings and narratives of painting. The poetic interiority of my work aims for generative conversation within the viewing experience. The Anonymous Citizen series aims to challenge the idea of naming, exploring ideas of “we” versus the individual. I make use of color as if it were a machine exploring human rights within color theory and the portrait. The focus is on the relationships of colors versus color in isolation, which can be seen as a metaphor for identity when imperialism is critiqued as a system not an event."
Tell us a little about yourself (where you are from) and your background in the arts.
I am an artist located in Vermont and New York and I primarily work in paint. I am currently a resident at Collar Works and Chashama. I was born to French Canadian parents and have lived throughout New England, including an island off the coast of Maine. I am currently in the process of moving to Greenwich, NY.
I began seriously studying painting when I was 15 and went to a watercolor school in New Hampshire where we painted the portrait in watercolor about 300 times in various techniques. The formative years of watercolor’s transparency has sort of always been with me.
What kind of work are you currently making?
For the past four years, I’ve been revisiting the traditional portrait specifically. This series of paintings, titled Anonymous Citizens has been a way for me to challenge the idea of “naming.” As I consider what a common or other world might look like, I am also considering the idea of “we” versus “I”. I’d like to believe in the potential for shifting identities, whether that means shifting perspectives from observation of a landscape, shifting perspectives from memory, and even internally held belief systems. This process also gives me the space to unlearn imperialism. My focus is on the relationship of colors versus color in isolation, which can be seen as a metaphor for identity when imperialism is critiqued as a system not an event.
I use children’s brushes, well made brushes I've had for years, rags, my fingers to make marks. Working in a series helps to inform the work, they have conversations with each other, sometimes I put paintings away for months and come back to it while heavily involved in a new series. I work on 10-20 paintings simultaneously, so it sometimes takes years for one painting to be finished. In this way, my work is done in a journalistic manner, combining views from memory while painting out of doors, documenting specific moments in time, that I can’t just click backwards on. I enjoy slowly watching a painting evolve into its own being or monster, as I sometimes see it.
What is a day like in the studio for you?
I paint on the floor, on walls, from ceilings, and on tables. I don't work from pre-conceived ideas of what the painting will look like, rather I’d like the viewer to gain their own perspectives from it. In order for me to relate to the physicality of the material I need to relate to the space around me. I work from observation, and from intuition primary aiming to create a narrative about lost and found edges using color as a machine to create movement. I am drawn to paint for its immediacy, its fluidity, it’s element of chance, and how it respects gravity. All of these attitudes of paint make it the most challenging for me to manipulate.
What are you looking at right now and/or reading?
I drive through Grandma Moses landscapes while on my way to the studio, and upon arrival I walk up three flights of stairs watching four textile artists getting to work. My third floor studio offers city scape perspectives through mill size windows. It is wonderful to be developing a new community of artists in upstate New York.
I just finished reading "To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf, and "Caliban and the Witch" by Silivia Federici. My current bibliography is: Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. Verso. 2019 Chomsky, Noam. Language and Problems of Knowledge. The MIT Press. 1988. Miller, James. The Passion of Michel Foucault, Simon & Schuster, 1993. Painter, Nell Irvin. The History of White People. W. W. Norton & Company. 2010.
Where can we find more of your work? (ex. website/insta/gallery/upcoming shows)
Website: www.renee-bouchard.com
My upcoming exhibitions are “Painting at Night” at Opalka Gallery at Russell Sage College in Albany, NY this September with Collar Works and the Artist/Mother Podcast. Also, “Down the Rabbit Hole” at Lights Out Gallery in Norway, ME is running through December 2024. Those interested in visiting my studio in person can make an appointment while I am an artist-in-residence at Collar Works and Chashama at 50 4th Street in Troy, NY through the end of this year on my website. Hope you stay in touch!
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