For as long as she can remember, Renee Raub-Ayers has been a self-described “mark-maker.”
“From a very young age, I had a need to draw and express myself,” she says. The Alton, IL-based artist began drawing with whatever was available to her, but it wasn’t until her teens that she began to paint, inspired by a high school teacher who encouraged her to pursue her passion.
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Raub-Ayers, 43, is not classically trained. She is self-taught and her technique, and style, are her own. She describes her work as modern folk art: large-scale, female in subject matter, with a limited color palette.
Raub-Ayers works as an accountant and dedicates a few evenings a week to painting at her home studio. When Houska Gallery in St. Louis’ Central West End began representing her in 2014, the exposure and support enabled her to sell more work, and so she began to paint more consistently. “When I started selling my work, painting became something I could afford to do more often,” she says. “Paint, canvases, these are expensive things and I don’t think people are always aware.”
Despite her artistic development, Raub-Ayers doesn’t foresee any changes in her professional life. She still views her art as a side hustle. “I don’t want to walk up to a canvas and think I have to paint something that is going to sell,” she explains, “I don’t want to feel that way—I don’t want to do art because I want to make money.”
Acrylics are her primary medium. She likes them for their build-ability, as well as for their forgiveness. “Oils can get muddy. Acrylics dry quickly, can be layered and blurred by adding water.” The softer lines in her work are achieved by waiting for the paint to partially dry. She then uses a dry brush to soften the image and even out the lines.
Johannes Vermeer, Maurits Escher, and Andrew Wyeth are some of her artistic influences, but Raub-Ayers draws inspiration from her surroundings, too. “I paint what I know. And being female, I often paint pictures of a girl. Every painting I make starts with a story about what she and I are going through, or what we’re going to work out. Painting has always been a way for my brain to have more space and time to process complex things. In doing that, the girl takes on some parts of me,” she says. Oftentimes, the image is overlaid with vines or botanicals, an ode to Raub-Ayers’ love of gardens, or with circles, a symbol she associates with innocence.
The scale of her pieces are also noteworthy. Most images are 48” x 60” and some are even as large as 5’ x 8’. “I started painting big when we moved into our house in 2008, and there were a lot of big walls that needed to be filled. But I liked how it felt to make large brushstrokes using a large paintbrush and not being worried about little details. Now almost everything I paint is on a large canvas.”
“Renee’s artwork and subject matter can be very straightforward and emotionally expressive to a viewer or client,” says Charlie Houska, owner of Houska Gallery. “They tend to connect instantly with a common feeling of angst or particular drama Renee has projected into her work but rendered in her half-smile, eye-wink style.”
