Artist Talk with Christina Renfer Vogel
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Hoover Public Library 200 Municipal Drive, Hoover, Alabama 35216
Meet Chattanooga artist Christina Renfer Vogel in this conversation with HPL Galleries curator, Jennifer Marshall. Christina will discuss and share her artwork in this pre-recorded virtual event.
Christina Renfer Vogel holds an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and a BFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. She currently serves as an associate professor of painting and drawing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Vogel has been an artist-in-residence with the JSS in Civita program (Civita Castellana, Italy), Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts (Rabun Gap, GA), the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (Amherst, VA), the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT) and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts (Nebraska City, NE). She is a recipient of a Lighton International Artists Exchange Program grant and an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant, among other awards.
Artist Statement:
I pursue interaction and perception from my role as observer, occupied by the unremarkable and the relationships that exist within our everyday exchanges. My interests lie in what painter and writer Mira Schor has identified as “modest painting,” what she describes as “the small, unimportant, the anonymous, the private and personal.” Reflecting direct encounters, I work from still life, portraiture and landscape, the pillars of perceptual painting. Drawing from the quotidian and familiar, I navigate the space between seeing and describing, interpretation and invention.
These intimate paintings of verdant landscapes and lean interiors were made on site, an anachronistic way of working in our contemporary time. I have become something of a reluctant plein air painter. I hope to sidestep the romance and conventions wrapped up in landscape painting, but at the same time, I embrace the genre’s deep historical roots. Through this work, I grapple with the problem of squaring my occupation with the mundane against the idea of the heroic landscape and seek to strike a balance between complex, spectacular terrains and humble interiors.