About Rachel

Hi, there!  I am a science-y artist & creative scientist lucky enough to be born into a science-y & creative family.  I have been sewing, crafting, & building anything I could get my hands on (legos, Barbie houses, IKEA furniture, lab equipment, you name it) since I was a child, and finally started painting in my 30's.

Many people come to coloring, drawing, or painting mandalas at times of transition in their lives & I was no different. I'd left the lab and was not fully a scientist anymore, but I had not yet settled into my teaching career. I was in a transitional period that lasted for over three years. In drawing and painting mandalas I integrated disparate parts of my Self and learned to trust myself more fully every day. I even wrote my master's thesis on using a daily mandala practice to connect with one's inner intuitive self.

After creating so many mandalas for so long, I felt compelled to paint outside of the circle & began to paint intuitive abstracts. The layers of acrylic paint often follow a similar pattern & mimic my personal developmental stages, thus my intuitive paintings can be considered abstracted self-portaits or self-landscapes (not so different from my mandalas). I hope you see some of yourself in my paintings, as I am inspired to paint the universality of the development of a true Self over a lifetime.

I can’t believe that I’ve been painting for 9 years!! Recently I’ve been experimenting with sharing inner layers, closer to an authentic self (or earlier developmental stages) and you can see this reflected in my obsessive use of scribbles of charcoal, colored pencils, and watercolor crayons along with the puddles of colorful paint that I play in.