We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Rachel Major a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Rachel, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about the things you feel your parents did right and how those things have impacted your career and life.

I come from a family deeply rooted in the arts. My father was a theatre/opera director and my mother was in arts education/policy and my uncle was a poet. Music, art, theatre, literature were all around me growing up. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I understood how unusual this was and how fortunate I was. As an extremely shy and introverted child my parents thought that I would become an actor or an artist. Early on they saw I was drawn to visual art and they nurtured and encouraged that by taking me to museums, enrolling me in art classes and buying me art materials and tolerating my collecting habit. Growing up, I was never a big sketcher or drawer, I always preferred to make things. When you make things, you collect things and I was a big collector of things. Things that some people would call garbage. My parents still joke about the closet full of cardboard egg cartons I saved. How else was I going to make that caterpillar?
There was never a question of the value of art, it was a given, a normal, natural part of life. So for me, even though I studied music in high school and and attempted to be an english major at university, I eventually gravitated towards art which felt (finally) natural and right. I never chose to be an artist, it took a while but eventually it chose me.

Rachel, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Originally from Toronto, Canada, I am a graduate of The Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) as well as the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) and received an MFA from Mills College in Oakland. I have been living and working in San Francisco since 1994. I work with San Francisco Art Education Project, LEAP as well as SFUSD teaching art to children in San Francisco public schools.

My current series of paintings began a few years ago as a direct result of the work from the past 30 years. I spent my third year of art school in Florence, Italy where I started taking pictures of mannequins in store windows and juxtaposing them with photos of raw meat in butcher shop windows. As someone with an eating disorder that began in my teens, I had developed an interest in North American standards of beauty and the objectification of women, and I soon began to examine the conflict between the mind’s will and the body’s appetite through my artwork. I explored our complex and often fraught relationship with food through my sculpture, paintings, collages and photographs focusing mostly on meat. The power and mythology of meat and how it represents men as powerful (for example: as hunters, carvers, grillers) and women as weak (for example: as it is expressed in our language- chick, (fat) cow, (old) crow etc..) is an endless source of fascination for me. Much of my work juxtaposed images of meat and dead animals with materials and processes that are traditionally female (fabric, needlepoint, organic shapes). This contradiction of subject with a method and art form that is traditionally seen as women’s work explored gender stereotypes, objectivity, display and beauty as well as power, virility and control. My final series of paintings using this subject matter are very controlled and deliberate. I started adding drips to some of these paintings for contrast as well as representing a human/animal quality to the paintings. I became intrigued with the drips and the challenges of letting go of control and began to make paintings with just drips.
These drip paintings became about control, covering up and exposing. They are made solely by dripping paint onto canvas. I control the placement of the drip only to give up that control and allow the paint to move on its own, through gravity and chance, choosing its own path. Occasionally I’ll coax the paint to move in a direction that exposes specific colors and covers others. Fragments of color are left trying to hide yet pushing to be seen. Consciously giving up control is challenging. But it forces me to constantly change and problem-solve to create a cohesive painting. The end result is a contradiction of a freedom and a tension as the paintings emerge.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

Arts Education. Artists will never get the support they need if people don’t value art. And if you’ve never had any experience making art, seeing art, learning about art, talking about art how can you possibly value art? And if you don’t value art you will not invest in it through policies and organizations that support the arts or buying and investing in artworks and artists.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

When someone takes an interest in something I’ve made. That I can have an impact and stir something in someone. It always takes me by surprise that the thought, energy and imagination that goes into something I’ve made can mean something to someone else. It is quite moving to experience that.

Contact Info:

• Website: rachelmajor.com
• Instagram: rachelsmajorart/rachelsmajorstreetfood
• Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/rachel-major

Image Credits
Donald Felton (Almac Camera), Francis Baker, Patanisha Alia Williams