ABOUT
A Statement
I paint at the edge of beauty and unease. My work explores how landscapes — whether natural or political — hold both grace and volatility. I am drawn to charged moments: a cleared highway after protest, a quiet marsh at dusk, a field bursting with wildflowers. Each painting asks viewers to linger inside that tension, to feel the emotional weight beneath the surface.
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Oil paint is my anchor — a medium historically associated with beauty and permanence — but I disrupt it by mixing in crushed marble, sand, and other found or “dangerous” materials. This process creates surfaces that are as much built as painted, forcing the image to hold both fragility and grit.
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Gesture and texture are my language. Each stroke is a record of friction, each surface a witness to the forces that shape it. The paintings are not static images but encounters — spaces where beauty, danger, and memory intersect.
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Ultimately, I see my work as an invitation to slow down and enter into dialogue with the world. By engaging deeply with each surface, viewers are asked to consider what lies beneath first impressions, and to recognize that even beauty carries weight, history, and urgency.
About
Rachel Romanowsky is an American and British artist whose large-scale oil paintings explore beauty, collective memory, and human connection. Known for her intricate, tactile surfaces, she combines crushed marble, sand, and found materials into her paint to create richly layered works that invite viewers to slow down and engage more deeply.
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Classically trained, Romanowsky draws on Impressionist gesture and Abstract Expressionist materiality, pushing traditional oil painting into new territory. She cites Marshall McLuhan’s ideas on media as a conceptual influence, approaching her paintings as messages in themselves — not static images, but catalysts for reflection and conversation.
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Her recent work explores protest, resistance, and collective action as forms of beauty. The ongoing Battle for Flowers series depicts moments where public spaces become charged sites of meaning — a cleared highway occupied by skateboarders and flowers, bridges lined with spectators, and gestures of defiance transformed into quiet acts of grace. By embedding crushed marble and found materials into the painted surface, she evokes the grit and physicality of these encounters, inviting viewers to feel their weight and urgency.
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Community involvement is central to Romanowsky’s practice. She sees her paintings as a way to bring people together in dialogue about how we experience media, power, and public space. Through artist talks and exhibitions, she encourages audiences to see protest not only as confrontation but also as an expression of care — a collective insistence on imagining a better future.
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Romanowsky’s work is held in private collections across the U.S., U.K., and Europe. After several years living in London, England and Zurich, Switzerland she is now based in Boston, Massachusetts, where she continues to experiment with materials and scale to expand the possibilities of oil painting.