Rebecca Wallace has been teaching painting and drawing at Yuba College for four semesters and has enjoyed every day spent with students and faculty. I had the chance to sit down with Wallace to discuss her lifestyle as both an artist and an educator.
Wallace’s inspiration is driven by her love of music. Enticed by the layering of how music is created when sampling other sounds in different music, Wallace finds inspiration in how music progressively gets put together. In this progress, she relates to how music and art go hand in hand when both are being created.
Wallace also finds inspiration in the Romantic Era. This era in particular captivates her because of the landscape work done in this time as well as the focus on lighting. In her own work, Wallace focuses on landscape work and creating spaces within the painting. These spaces create an abundance of self reflected imagery that focuses on the depths of our psychological being.
She visualizes art to be an on-going notion of practicing and sampling until the answer is found within the layers of inspiration and artistic process in figuring out how the piece will come together in the end.
Drawing has been the foundation of Wallace’s art career. She shares how her interest developed into something she is passionate about, “The story I remember as a kid is going to Rite Aid or CVS around Easter time and they have those coloring papers where you can color the picture and you can win a contest. That’s my earliest memory, wanting to draw those Easter bunny papers, meaning that I always liked it as a kid. I always liked to draw.”
Throughout the years, Wallace’s passion in her art has undoubtedly grown since those Easter activities. Her interest has developed into something she enjoys doing: teaching. Although Wallace has only been teaching at Yuba College for four semesters, she has established connections with the students and finds inspiration in them.
Wallace’s style of art is one of development, patience and discovery. Her work is typically presented as series that last for about a year before she shifts into a different series of pieces. Although a new series is in process, she notices that her pieces have a faint connection to one another in past and present series. In this realization, Wallace finds her vague idea of a piece to be a potential discovery of the answer that has yet to be found.
“I’m not really sure a lot of times what the answer is going to be. I just have sort of a vague idea in my head of something I want to explore and then I kind of let it happen. Sometimes you have to sit there for months and you don’t know the answer. So it takes patience.”
In her career, Wallace has found patience to be a virtue in developing into a better artist. She exemplifies the significant importance of the journey in creating art. The answer is found not in the end, but in the journey itself.
Note: This article was featured in the Spring 2016 edition of The Prospector.
Regina is in her first semester of writing for The Prospector. She is a sushi, arts, and dog enthusiast.
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