Renata Lucia
Can’t See the Forest
On View: February 23 – April 20, 2024 I Hallway Gallery
Opening Reception: Friday, February 23, 2024 | 6 - 8 PM
Artist Talk: Saturday, April 20, 2024 | Starting at 1 PM
Can’t See the Forest is an exhibition by Renata Lucia of ecological drawings, printing plates, and collagraphs that are equal parts warning, love letter, and documentation delivered in trees. The title is borrowed from the phrase “can’t see the forest for the trees,” to highlight how focusing on the wrong details can lead to failure to notice what’s important as an ecological whole. Lucia strives to shift aesthetics to a wilder landscape, inspire wonder, and encourage local ecosystem conservation. As an artist, naturalist, and environmental advocate, her practice is rooted in regular engagement with her environment through plein air studies, volunteer work for local nonprofit organizations, naturalist excursions, and ecological study.
Lucia’s “Wildwoods” series features tree portraits from those interactions in Houston neighborhoods, Texas State Parks (including the now-lost Fairfield Lake State Park), and the Russell Farm Art Center in North Texas. The images emphasize an ecologically important but overlooked microhabitat within the trees - tree holes and hollows. In an urban setting, trees and branches with holes are often removed for aesthetic purposes, but this natural stage of tree life and death reverberates through the environment and would benefit us all if those that can remain safely are left wild and undisturbed. Where there are holes, there is life.
Lucia’s “Sylvan Transformations” collagraph series forefronts disturbance, featuring trees transformed to ubiquitous packaging materials, to collagraph printing plates, and then framed images on paper. The prints are created by carving tree imagery into flattened packaging (such as unfolded printer cartridge or pasta boxes) to create printing plates that are intaglio printed or viscosity printed (multi-color printing that incorporates relief and intaglio techniques). The imagery includes healthy trees and snags, deformed urban trees, wooden power poles (former trees), microhabitats, and consequences of habitat loss. Sunsets depicted in the viscosity prints offer both end-of-day comfort and warning of the impending climate crisis. The printing plates are also presented to highlight the materiality and presence of the trees and clarify the printing process.
Artist Bio
Dendrophile Renata Lucia grew up amid forests and woodlands of the Columbia Bottomlands along the Texas Gulf Coast, which provide the roots of her ecological artworks. Being enclosed by trees and surrounded by books were two safe spaces from her youth, while string instruments provided a soothing soundtrack.
She worked as a classically-trained, professional violist in the 1980’s and ‘90s, followed by a career in technical writing. After a chondrosarcoma diagnosis in 2000, she took her first art class when she joined the Glassell School of Art, MFAH. She became the first trained artist in her family of outsider artists when she graduated from there with a Painting specialization.
During the covid-19 pandemic, Renata Lucia became a naturalist, joining the local chapters of the Texas Master Naturalists and the Native Plant Society of Texas, and obtained employment in the state office of the later. She later joined a plein air painting group exploring her childhood ecoregion. This reconnection with nature and local ecological processes as well as the dread of on-going climate change are reflected in evocative landscape paintings, tree drawings, prints, and explorations of alternative materials.
Her work has been featured twice in the periodical New American Paintings and in Manifest Gallery’s International Painting Annual 9 Exhibition-in-Print. She has been a resident artist at Houston’s Project Row Houses and Burleson’s Russell Farm Art Center, and an award winner at both the Lawndale Big Show and an Assistance League of Houston Celebrates Texas Art exhibition.
She lives in Houston, TX and works out of her home studio in the Sharpstown area.
Instagram: @renluart