This weekend I’m packing up my artwork and jewelry and heading to **A Summer’s Palette**, the Ashford Area Arts Council’s annual art show — and I’m excited (and a little anxious, as always) to say it’s my first time selling there! The whole thing takes place outdoors on the gorgeous grounds of Westford Hill Distillers in Ashford, Connecticut, with dozens of local artists, live music, and plenty of plein air painting happening right there on the lawn. If you’re around the “quiet corner” of the state this weekend, come say hi, browse my booth, and soak up a proper New England summer afternoon.

Come find me! Booth #1
Saturday 27th. 10-5 pm.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Mountain Tree Studios and my work, please visit:

Mountain Tree Studios

The images I made were double exposures: a modern-day photograph of the object overlaid with archival imagery from the war the object had lived through. But I wasn’t illustrating a concept. I was trying to show something I genuinely believed was true — that the archive was already there, held inside the metal.

The pilot’s helmet was the image that crystallized it for me. I photographed it in close-up — oxygen mask, cracked rubber, the worn straps of something that had been worn against a human face. And in the visor, where a reflection of the museum ceiling should have been, I composited the ghost of a wartime squadron: aircraft in formation, caught mid-flight. The apparatus sees what the human no longer can. Where the face has gone, the war remains.

There was a photograph I made looking directly down the barrel of a naval gun. At the far end of that dark cylinder of rifled steel, I placed a warship: small, silhouetted, sitting on open water. The weapon is preserved, static, decommissioned. And yet the geometry of it is unchanged. The barrel still points. The alignment of metal and target — the basic mechanical fact of what this object was designed to do — is still legible in the steel. No one pulled a trigger. The gun simply persists in the posture of its purpose.

On one engine, cast into the metal itself, was the date: 1938. I found that impactful in the most interesting way. Not a label applied afterward. Not an archivist’s note. A date pressed into the object at the moment of its making, one year before the war began — as if the machine already knew what it was being made for. In my photograph, gas-masked figures drift behind the cylinders like a memory the engine is trying not to have.

Memory, in objects, is involuntary. It accumulates rather than intends.

What struck me then — and has never quite left me — was a particular kind of sadness embedded in all of this. As the last veterans died, as the last eyewitnesses aged out of living memory, there would come a moment when the only things that had actually been there were the objects. The machines would become the sole custodians of a direct, material memory. Not symbolic memory. Not recorded memory. Something stranger and more intimate than either: the memory of having been present.

The technique I used — the double exposure, the overlay of then and now — was an attempt to make that visible. To show the archived image not as something projected onto the object from outside, but as something emerging from within it. The war isn’t superimposed. It’s revealed.

There is one image in the series that sits differently from the rest. A typewriter: close up on the keys, the worn metal rings, the ghost of characters almost illegible under decades of oxidation, and a face subtly reflected in the metal. No weaponry. No violence implied. Just a machine of language, as silent now as all the others. It was used to write something. Orders, perhaps. Letters home. Reports on the dead. Whatever passed through it is gone, and the typewriter has no way to tell you. It simply remains, keys up, waiting for fingers that will not come.

I’ve been thinking about that project a lot lately, because I’ve come to realize it’s essentially what I’ve been painting all along.

My recent work — pieces like The Quiet Archive, a South Carolina tobacco barn with a live oak in the foreground — keeps returning to structures that hold more than they show. The barn stands weathered and apparently passive. But it was built by specific hands, in a specific economy, under specific conditions whose full weight is rarely spoken aloud. The live oak has watched all of it. Neither speaks. Both remember.

The painting’s job, as I understand it, is to slow the viewer down long enough that they begin to sense what the surface is holding.

That’s the quality I’m after in painting: the subtext that an object carries without announcing itself. In the photographs, I used a second image — the archive — to make the hidden layer visible. In painting, the metal leaf makes it ‘current’. It transforms under changing conditions: reading one way in morning light reads differently at dusk. But considering the subject, something else emerges. The barn, like the machine, holds more than it initially offers. It holds history and memory.

I didn’t fully see the connection between the two bodies of work until recently. The photographs asked: what do objects retain? The paintings ask the same question, by different means. Both are interested in the same thing — the archive that lives in a surface, the record that isn’t written anywhere but is nonetheless present, waiting for the right quality of attention, the right angle of light.

We tend to think of memory as something that lives in the mind. But it also lives in things — silently, without narrative, without the distortions that come with storytelling. The machines outlasted the war. The barns outlasted the people who worked them. The objects hold a kind of testimony that is neither true nor false, neither interpreted nor censored. It simply is.

My art school self was drawn to that idea because it felt melancholy. Now I find it something closer to sacrosanct.

If the painting ‘The Quiet Archive’ spoke to you, it’s available on www.mountaintreestudios.com

More about 'The QuietArchive'

Sometimes, if I have a very clear idea or I’m working on a commission, I will. But generally, I prefer to start with a general direction and let the materials take me somewhere. It sounds a little loose to say it out loud, but there’s a logic to it. The materials have their own qualities, their own resistances and surprises. If you let them, they’ll push back on what you thought you were making and show you something better.

Metal is the right material for my jewelry because of exactly this quality. It’s solid — substantial, permanent, the kind of thing that lasts. But you heat it, and it bends. That transformation fascinates me. Something that seems fixed turns out to be more supple than it looks. I love that about it.

Soldering, for the record, is my least favorite part of the process. I say this as someone who does it regularly and has made peace with it. But the part I love is that collaborative quality — starting something, thinking it will go one way, and discovering it’s going somewhere else entirely. Sometimes I surprise myself — or it surprises me. That’s when the work feels most alive.

The paintings have a more prescribed sequence, but the spirit is similar. I work in layers, and the layering has to happen in a certain order. First, the gesso, to prepare the board. Then, a textural background — I make my own textural medium for this. Then the gold or copper leaf, which goes on, dries, gets cleared of excess, and then sealed. Then several rounds of paint over the textural layer, building depth. Then, finally the detail work over the top.

It takes time. There’s a lot of waiting. And I’ll often have several paintings on the go at once, moving between them as each layer dries. Sometimes a piece sits for weeks — or longer — without my fully knowing how it’s going to finish. I’ll start a painting without being certain what the real subject matter will be. The painting tells me, eventually.

My work with reflective materials started as a solution to a problem. I wanted to say a particular thing — to capture the way light shifts across a landscape — and I had to figure out how to do it. That’s been the pattern with most of the techniques I’ve developed. I’m not working from an established tradition here. I’m working from the question: what am I trying to express, and what will let me express it?

The work has changed dramatically since I started. There are early pieces I look at and see how crude they are — important stepping stones, but clearly early attempts. And there are a few I still love. The evolution feels less like progress towards a fixed destination and more like getting better at listening. Better at figuring out how to tell a story.

I shop local and small when I can, for my supplies. But sometimes consistency requires working with larger suppliers, and I don’t pretend otherwise. And I’m always curious about what else is out there — what other materials might unlock something new. That hunting, that experimenting, is part of the work.

I’m coming off a show last weekend that surprised me in the best possible way — work sold faster than expected, and I’ve spent the week happily scrambling to refill the gaps. I’m arriving at Litchfield with fresh work and a lot of momentum.

Come find me there!

I didn’t set out to be an artist. My degree was in chemistry and astrophysics, which I quickly discovered I wasn’t cut out for. So I became a civil servant in England instead, which sounds like quite the pivot, and it was. But somewhere inside that role, something shifted.

I started taking on more and more of the design work. Websites, graphics, and visual communications. I taught myself the software. And I realized I loved it — not just the technical side of it, but the act of making something that communicated visually. That was where the bug bit me, I think.

When my husband and I moved to America, I was freelancing in design, and I started making jewelry on the side. I’d made jewelry as a small child and always loved it, but it was never something that was considered a career option when I was growing up. So it lived quietly at the back of my mind for a long time. Moving to a new country gave me a kind of permission to try things differently.

What started as a side hustle gradually became the thing I cared about most. And at some point, I decided that if I was going to do this properly, I needed to learn properly. So, I went to art school in California.

The technical skills mattered, obviously. But the most important thing I took from art school wasn’t a technique. It was a way of thinking. One of my teachers said something I’ve never forgotten: look at the things you’re drawn to and figure out what the connection is. That’s your concept. That’s your specific vision — the thing that sets your work apart from everyone else’s.

So I did. I looked at what I kept gravitating towards: things with a historical feel, a symbolic weight. Objects and places that meant something. It made sense, in retrospect. Growing up in England, I was surrounded by history at every turn. When I moved — first within England, then across an ocean — I missed that presence. That sense of things having lasted, having witnessed.

That’s the thread that runs through my jewelry. I work with symbols that appear across ancient cultures, across continents, across time — shapes and forms that show up in Celtic tradition and in cultures far beyond it. The idea that human beings have, across all their differences, reached for the same kinds of meaning. I find that quietly extraordinary. And I love drawing those connections together in a piece someone can wear.

The paintings came from a different place, but the same instinct. When I was in California, I spent a lot of time doing landscape photography, and what I kept noticing was light. Not just light, but how light shifts — how a landscape looks completely different depending on where you’re standing, what time of day it is, what season. I wanted to be able to hold that in a painting. To make something that actually changes with the viewer rather than staying fixed. But I was equally drawn to what lies beneath the surface of a landscape — the histories embedded in ordinary places, the emotional weight a view can carry without announcing it. The sense that a field or a barn or a line of trees has witnessed things, absorbed things, and holds them quietly, whether anyone notices or not. Light became the way in. What’s hidden beneath it became the reason to look.

Two media, two different starting points. But the same question underneath both of them: how do you make something that connects?

Come find me at Booth 12!

This event is close to my heart and close to my home! For those of you who are local, please stop by and say ‘Hi’. I have a great spot in from of the town hall, so I’m easy to find.

I hope to see you there!

If you’re interested in finding out more about Mountain Tree Studios and my work, please visit:

Mountain Tree Studios

The House That Waits began, as most of my paintings do, from the ground down. Literally. Before the sky exists, before the house takes shape, I build the world beneath the surface — a sculptural medium I mix myself from Plaster of Paris, laid thick and allowed to dry over several days until it sets into something that feels almost geological. Then come the layers of acrylic, metallic highlights outlining the ridges, deep shadow pushed into the crevices, until the underground becomes something alive. Root systems. Strata. Memory made visible.

Only then do I lay the gold leaf. That luminous, changeable sky — the kind that shifts as you move, that seems lit from within — comes after the earth is already established. I’ve always been drawn to light, the way it doesn’t just illuminate but changes things depending on where you stand. The gold does that. The texture does it too, in a different way. Light finds the surfaces and makes them mean something new.

The clouds are always last. I don’t fully understand why. But they feel like punctuation — whatever the painting has decided to say by then, the clouds frame it.

Home is a strange word. For some people, it’s a specific place — a house they grew up in, a town they never left, a landscape that lives in the body. I’ve always found myself slightly outside of that. I grew up somewhere that never quite felt like mine, moved around, rebuilt, moved again. Home has always been more of a question than an answer for me. I suspect I’m not alone in that.

Which is perhaps why I keep painting houses.

Not the interiors — the outsides, and what’s underneath. The idea that a place holds the people who have lived within it. That the walls absorb something of every life that passed through. That the land, more patient still, holds even more — not just the lives but the labor, the seasons, the joy, the grief, the ordinary Tuesdays. All of it compressed into layers beneath the grass line.

The house in this painting isn’t a real place. It came from my imagination, assembled from the quiet grammar of old New England homesteads — the whitewash, the mossy roof, the solitary tree. But it feels real to me in the way that imagined places sometimes feel more real than actual ones. It has seen generations. It means something to someone — maybe several someones. It is still there, still standing, still waiting.

Waiting for what? That’s yours to decide. For the figure in the field to come home. For someone who left long ago and hasn’t yet returned. For the simple acknowledgment that it existed, that lives were lived here, that the ground remembers even when the people are gone.

When I paint a scene like this, I want two experiences to be available to you. The first is the surface — the gold sky, the warm light, whatever feeling the landscape calls up. Joy, nostalgia, longing. Whatever it is for you, it’s right.

But I also want you to look down. Below the grass line, into the texture and the dark. Everything that made this place, everything it has absorbed, everything that grows in the dark and feeds what we see in the light.

Every place has this. Every life does too.

The house waits. The ground remembers. The figure could be any of us.

The House That Waits is a mixed-media painting on wood panel — sculptural medium, acrylic, and gold leaf. 8x10”.

If this piece speaks to you, it is available on mountaintreestudios.com

More about The House That Waits

Some paintings arrive fully formed. Others ask you to wait. Resting Place was the latter — I began, as I often do in my What Lies Beneath series, by building the world first: the deep, textured earth below, layered with my own sculptural medium and multiple washes of acrylic, and the gold leaf sky above, flat and luminous and reflective. The figure came to me gradually, but even then, he had to wait — I could only place him once the trees were done. He needed somewhere to rest before he could rest there.

What arrived was simple and human: a figure, sitting quietly under a tree. His dog at his feet, if you look closely enough to find it. A fence line holding the world in place. This is his place — the place he comes back to, to breathe, to be still, to remember that he is part of something larger than whatever is pressing on him that day. I only named the painting once it was finished, and Resting Place said everything I needed it to say — though what it means to you is yours to decide.

The What Lies Beneath series is about the things that surround us, in nature and in life, that we move past without seeing. Beneath this quiet scene, tree roots thread down into that churning, complex earth — all that hidden work, that hidden life, happening constantly whether we notice it or not. The painting is a reminder that connection to nature is always available to us. We just have to stop. Sit down. Rest a while.

The 12x24” format is new for this series — I wanted the ground to dominate, to give physical weight to what lies beneath. It felt right for this piece. Sometimes the proportions tell you something too.

If this piece spoke to you, it is available on mountaintreestudios.com

More about 'Resting Place'

This space is an invitation in.

I'm Rachel, and I'm a working artist based in West Hartford, Connecticut. I make two very different things: mixed-media paintings on wood panel, built up with acrylics and metal leaf; and handcrafted metalwork jewelry in bronze, copper, and pewter, drawing on ancient symbols from across human history. They're different worlds, but to me they're deeply connected — and this newsletter is where I'll be exploring both.

I’ve been thinking about what I want to share with you here, and the honest answer is: all of it. The finished pieces that make it out into the world, yes — but also the ones that are still finding their way. The sketch on the workbench. The moment a painting shifts from feeling stuck to feeling alive. The ideas that keep me awake at 3 am and won’t leave me alone. The particular way light moves across a metal leaf painting that reminds me of a real place.

But I also want to share the less tangible things — the concepts that drive my paintings, the ideas I’m turning over in my mind, what it actually feels like to live as a working artist. What inspires me, what stops me in my tracks, what sends me down a rabbit hole. The painting I can’t move forward with yet, and have no idea why. The moment something in the world — a quality of light, a fragment of history, an old building, a story — suddenly makes everything click into place.

I work in two worlds that feel, to me, deeply connected. In paint, I’m endlessly fascinated by light — how it transforms a surface, how it changes how a painting appears depending on the hour you look at it. But I’m equally drawn to what lies beneath the surface of the everyday: the histories embedded in ordinary places, the quiet undercurrents of a landscape, the things that shaped a moment long before we arrived in it. A painting, for me, is rarely just what it appears to be at first glance.

In metal, I’m drawn to symbols that have meant something to people across centuries and cultures — the kind of marks humans have always made to say I was here, and this mattered.

Both, in their way, are about looking deeper. And so is this newsletter.

So here’s what you can expect from me in this space: process and progress, concepts and curiosities, works in progress and newly finished pieces. The behind-the-scenes stuff that doesn’t always make it to Instagram. The thinking behind the making.

If you’re already subscribed, thank you for being here. If you’ve stumbled across this some other way, there’s a subscribe button just below — I’d love to have you along for the journey.

More soon — and thank you, truly, for your interest in my work. It means more than you know.

Warmly,
Rachel
Mountain Tree Studios