Rene Disbrow

Rene Disbrow forayed into the world of art as a young child, crayons were her medium of choice. Her first showing, on the refrigerator door, was a smash hit.
Encouraged, she continued developing her artist side. Soon, she graduated to the John Nagy "Learn to Draw" set to get tutelage in a more realistic style. She became obsessed with trying to draw realistically, but was never satisfied with the results. There was a lot of stomping of 5 year old feet. Throughout her school years, she always took art classes, and at one point even had private art lessons.
College was a long drawn out affair; first she attended a community college in Washington state, where she majored in art, pottery to be precise. She soon realized that she couldn't make a living at "art", and had no real direction. Serendipity would then step in and steer her towards Art Center College of Design in Pasadena CA., where she earned her B.A. in Advertising Design in 1980. Chicago became her home for the next 20 plus years, where she toiled as an Art Director, in the fields of nearly every major ad agency there.
In 2000 the fates collided and destiny took a hand in her future. First, her mother asked her to do a painting of some fruit. Second, the bottom fell out of the advertising business. Third, the stock market crashed. So, while she was sitting there watching life as she knew it collapse, she started painting the fruit her mother had asked for. An obsession was born. Long story short, in 2003 she got out of Chicago, and moved to New Mexico to begin her new passion, one that had lain dormant for most of her life. The first time she painted a pear, and looked at it, really LOOKED at it, she became fascinated with the layers of colors, the bumps and bruises, and the shapes that they grow in. Painting in the photorealistic style and taking her cues from the great Dutch Masters she admires, she wants to bring a modern singularity to focus in her work. The distillation of objects is a conscious one. The use of the black, without light encourages the exploration of what is before us. Each time she paints, she strives to capture the complexities of one very vivid, radiant, note. She uses a layering technique of oil glazes, sometimes with as many as 40 layers in some areas of a single fruit or vegetable. With this type of technique, it can take a month to complete even the smallest of paintings. It is an obsession. Ok, she's crazy....and loving it.