"Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together."- John Ruskin
Rachel Magdalen Drennen (born 1998) is an oil painter and draftsman based in Chester County, Pennsylvania. She received a full-tuition scholarship to study painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 2016 to 2020. In 2019, she received a three-month travel scholarship to study from the old masters in France, Italy, Spain, and England. In 2021, Rachel started advanced oil painting studies at the Charles H. Cecils Studio in Florence, where she currently continues to study and hone her craft.
Rachel believes that craftsmanship is paramount to art making, and enjoys practicing and experimenting in a plethora of media and techniques, and making her own paints, grounds, and surfaces. She is a firm believer in and practitioner of T.S. Eliot's words, "Immature artists copy; mature artists steal," and discards the modernist ideas of deskilling, originality, and the primacy of self-expression. Rather, Rachel desires to work in a continuum with the masters of the past, and looks to artists such as Botticelli, Ingres, Velasquez, Vuillard, and the Pre-Raphaelites for inspiration. A lover of the human face and form, Rachel seeks to use her skill to capture the stories inherent in the human person, and to transpose the beauty of those eternal truths with paint and canvas.
Rachel Magdalen Drennen (born 1998) is an oil painter and draftsman based in Chester County, Pennsylvania. She received a full-tuition scholarship to study painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 2016 to 2020. In 2019, she received a three-month travel scholarship to study from the old masters in France, Italy, Spain, and England. In 2021, Rachel started advanced oil painting studies at the Charles H. Cecils Studio in Florence, where she currently continues to study and hone her craft.
Rachel believes that craftsmanship is paramount to art making, and enjoys practicing and experimenting in a plethora of media and techniques, and making her own paints, grounds, and surfaces. She is a firm believer in and practitioner of T.S. Eliot's words, "Immature artists copy; mature artists steal," and discards the modernist ideas of deskilling, originality, and the primacy of self-expression. Rather, Rachel desires to work in a continuum with the masters of the past, and looks to artists such as Botticelli, Ingres, Velasquez, Vuillard, and the Pre-Raphaelites for inspiration. A lover of the human face and form, Rachel seeks to use her skill to capture the stories inherent in the human person, and to transpose the beauty of those eternal truths with paint and canvas.
