Rhonda Harrow-Engel

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Rhonda was born and raised in NYC and attended the HS of Art and Design where she studied graphic arts, and the School of American Ballet until she left for college.

 

At Bard College, where Rhonda received her undergraduate degree in 1971, she majored in Fine Arts and, in her junior year, she studied at Tyler/Temple University in Rome, Italy.  After college she studied printmaking at Pratt Graphics Center and worked in the graphic arts field in NYC until 1991 when she moved to Delhi with her family. She began teaching at SUNY Delhi soon after. She received her Masters degree from Empire State College in 2007, and did her thesis on Marcel Duchamp and his influence on twentieth century art.

 

The past twenty years have been an odyssey of making art and scrambling to make a living. Although Rhonda is still in the process of discovery, she is happy to be showing paintings at this time.

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The body of work featured in this exhibit represents Rhonda's recent return to painting after many years of working with pastels, charcoal and graphite, and teaching studio arts and Art History at SUNY Delhi.

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Rhonda's focus for the work featured in this exhibit has been on the effects of sunlight on transparent and reflective surfaces. She is intrigued by the way reflections are opaque and transparent in the same instant. As careful observation reveals these qualities, each painting becomes a jigsaw puzzle of spatial relationships, and in this ongoing dialogue with the medium and the process of painting, she navigates the question of what to reveal, what to eliminate. In painting layer over layer, she looks for visual harmonies among the random objects of everyday life, balancing on the edge of spatial illusion and the reality of paint.