Now in his 70s, Glenn Renell has decades as a painter under his belt. “I’ve been at this a long time. As a kid, painting was the only thing I ever did.” He went on to earn undergraduate and graduate degrees in art, then taught at the Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine, for more than 20 years.
South by Southeast, oil on canvas, 32 x 24 in.
In his early days, Renell was an abstract expressionist. “I took drawing classes and developed figurative skills, but I was an abstract painter,” he says. In the mid-1980s, he shifted his focus to landscapes, though there’s still an abstract quality to his work that shines through.
For the past two years, he’s been working on a series of paintings based on the views immediately surrounding his home, which is located around 80 miles outside Tucson, Arizona. This series is the subject of an upcoming solo show at Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery titled View from my Backyard.
The landscapes depict the high desert, replete with grasslands, mesquite trees and cacti. “It’s not necessarily a dramatic landscape. In fact, it’s one of those places where, if you come in the middle of the day, you might wonder why anyone would want to live here,” Renell muses. “But early in the morning and late in the evening, it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world. There’s beauty in the starkness and simplicity of it.”
West to Yesterday, medium, 32 x 24 in.
For Renell, painting the same scenery over and over again isn’t boring. “The series really builds upon itself. I do one painting, and then I make different choices based on what I’ve done in previous paintings,” he says. “I never get stuck. I don’t have to reinvent everything with every painting, but I can choose where I’m going to apply my creativity.”
When he starts on a new painting, Renell often doesn’t have an idea of what it will look like when it’s done. And even when he does start with an idea, the imagery often evolves into something new as he’s working. In West to Yesterday, grasslands glow gold and purple under a dusky sky. “The theme of almost all of my paintings is looking at the time between night and day,” he says. “So many of the colors wind up looking different in different contexts.”
Butterfield Trace, medium, 32 x 24 in.
In addition to covering the same subject matters, the paintings in this series are all the same size and all vertically oriented. “It’s more challenging to work up a landscape in a vertical orientation,” he says. “When you think about how we look at things, we tend to scan along that horizontal horizon.” The vertical orientation tests the viewer’s perspective and adds a bit of intrigue to the story.
Glenn Renell: View from my Backyard opens at Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery in Tucson, Arizona, on September 20 and remains on view through October 18. —
Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery 6872 E Sunrise Drive, Suite #130 » Tucson, AZ 85750 (520) 722-7798 » www.medicinemangallery.com
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