Durham, NC
5/6/10 2:43 PM
I want to visit the places Rachel Campbell depicts in oil on canvas. These are real places—London as seen from the South Bank, a trailer park, a simple white house on a suburban street—but something about the way Campbell depicts them renders them absolutely magical, at once true to the way they exist in real life and yet utterly dreamy and luminescent. Her London is colored a murky rainbow, filled with charmingly crooked and childishly rendered skyscrapers, barges and domes. Her trailer parks glow with turquoise and hot pink homes, flying electrical wires and the most astonishingly filigreed trees. I want so much to visit these places—and thanks to Campbell I have, as best as one possibly can. These places, at least as depicted here, do not really exist out in the world. They exist in Campbell’s own experience and memory. How fortunate that she has the technical ability and generosity of spirit to have expended the effort of translating them onto painted canvas for all to see. The hope, then, is that her vision can color ours, encouraging others to see the wonders she finds out there.
—Lori Waxman