OEUVRE

 

Landscape Paintings

 

of Renee Radell

Landscape holds a special place in Renee Radell’s oeuvre. Her early work includes masterful watercolor studies of places she lived and visited, including the alleyways of Detroit, the quaint streets and houses of Quebec and coastal Canadian sea ports. 

 

Lacoste School of the Arts in France 

 

Landscape re-emerged as an important theme in 1986, when Radell took her first trip to France. For three summers, she taught painting at the Lacoste School of Arts in this breathtaking mountain village in southeastern France. There, she captured quaint vignettes of the historical medieval town and painted for the first time en plein air, in the Vaucluse Valley region where famous artists set up easels in the 1900s and Impressionism was born. 

 

The distant mountains surrounding Lacoste provided  an opportunity to experiment with abstracted landscape forms, textures and heightened colors, which lends many of these works a fantastic, dream-world quality. In fact,  an astute eye can depict elements of the Vaucluse Valley landscape series in her recent ventures into abstract art. 

 

Renee Radell’s European travels soon branched out to many European countries where she absorbed impressions of natural beauty as well as the charms of European village and city life.  She created landscape series in Southern Spain and the hamlets and castles of Germany.  Venturing North, Paris and Bruges inspired colorful cityscapes.

 

A painting of water and rocks in front of trees.
River Basin 2002 oil on canvas 46 x 52 in.

 

American Landscape Painting

 

Radell applied many landcape painting innovations from traveling to European countries, to American landscape scenes.  She treated the mountain lakes near the Delaware Water Gap to an aerial view that allows the water and land to overwhelm the tiny boats, people and piers that dot their shores.

 

Recently she has undertaken magnified, delicate studies of plants and flowers, including a series of “entangled weedscapes”. As Eleanor Heartney states in Renee Radell Web of Circumstance “in her hands they have as much character and personality as her paintings of people.”

 

Landscape Allegory

 

In fact, surrealism and allegory usually follow the brush of Renee Radell in one form or another especially when she becomes comfortable with a motif.  For example, several visits to Bruges inspired her important allegorical triptych Night Parade in Flanders.  

 

Finally, Renee Radell’s allegorical landscapes culminate in a magical picture titled Reality Exposed, a recent iconic piece wherein the artist pays homage to her favorite poet T.S.Eliot.  Therein, Renee Radell chooses nature and landscape to associate her deepest thoughts concerning the function of the artist.   

A painting of mountains and trees in the background.
Valley with Seedlings 2003 oil on canvas 22 x 40 in.
A painting of houses and buildings on the side of a river.
Amsterdam after the Rain 1992 oil on canvas 48 x 48 in.
A painting of a boat on the water
Bruges at Day's End 1992 oil on canvas 48 x 30 in.
A painting of trees and mountains with a moon in the background.
Valley with Moonlight 1999 oil on canvas 72 x 66 in.
A painting of trees and mountains with an orange sky
Silhouetted Sun in Spain 2006 oil on canvas 22 x 32 in.
A painting of two boats in the water
Mountina Lake w/ Orange Sky 1991 oil on canvas 48 x 36
A painting of a waterfall in the middle of a forest.
Mountina Lake with Secluded Inlet 1991 oil on canvas 58 x 30 in.
A painting of two boats in the water
Mountain Lake Revisited Sky 1991 oil on canvas 48 x 36 in.
A painting of a pink flower with green leaves.
Chosen 2010 oil on linen 36 x 36 in.
A painting of plants in the grass
Weedscape III 2014 oil on canvas 48 x 36 in.
A painting of an orange flower with green leaves.
Calla Lily 2010 oil on linen 36 x 36 in.
A painting of hummingbirds flying over flowers.
Reality Exposed 2015 mixed media on board 60 x 108 in.