Rachel Romanowsky
Rachel Romanowsky makes materially dense oil paintings that place ordered structures beside unruly growth. Brick walls, gardens, benches, foliage, and flowers recur in her work, often arranged at points where the built environment gives way to something less controlled. These threshold spaces reflect her interest in transition, uncertainty, and the tension between stability and change.
Romanowsky came to painting through architecture. She studied structural design in college, but the program was housed within the institution’s fine-art department and required coursework in traditional art disciplines. There she developed a serious commitment to oil painting and ultimately graduated with a BFA. Early exhibitions in Boston, New York City, and Miami followed.
Despite that momentum, Romanowsky stepped away from painting for a decade. A conversation with a gallerist left her uneasy about the valuations attached to her work and about the market’s distance from artistic expression. She moved into fashion marketing, working in New York and London, while painting remained on hold.
Her return was prompted by grief. When her father was diagnosed with cancer, Romanowsky began painting again as a way to process what was happening and to confront her own questions about mortality. The work became necessary rather than occasional. Later, while living in Zurich, she found a practical structure for rebuilding a full-time studio practice: the difference in time zones gave her quiet morning hours to paint before the United States began its workday.
The physical character of her paintings is central to that renewed practice. Romanowsky rejects a purely flat approach to painting, arguing that the medium must register the movement and complexity of contemporary experience. She blends ground marble dust into oil paint to create mass and texture, and has recently incorporated glass shards into some works. These materials make the surface more resistant and less easily consumed at a glance.
“The glass and the grit force that confrontation,” she says. For Romanowsky, material density is connected to a broader resistance to superficiality. The paintings require close looking, not simply because of their textured surfaces, but because they are built from contradictions: structure and spontaneity, familiarity and risk, cultivated spaces and wild growth.
Her daily studio practice is correspondingly disciplined. Romanowsky walks to her Boston studio in the morning and aims to arrive by 8:30. She begins with tea or coffee, sages the space, and sets intentions for the day. Rather than waiting for inspiration, she treats painting as sustained work. If one canvas is not yielding, she moves to another work in progress or begins a new one. She paints until 3:00 p.m., when she leaves to collect her seven-year-old twin sons from school.
The boundaries of that schedule matter. Romanowsky describes the studio as an intense and solitary environment, while motherhood provides an immediate, grounding counterpoint. The demands of both have led her to work with focus rather than romanticize the idea of artistic freedom without structure.
Place strongly affects the color and feeling of the paintings. Her walks through coastal New England, its architecture, and its shifting light all enter the work. Time spent abroad has been equally important. The Gardener, for example, grew out of mornings at the Zurich Botanical Garden and includes a reference to Monet’s Impressionism. Living in Zurich and London sharpened her attention to the way light behaves differently across locations and to the material qualities of stone, brick, and vegetation.
Romanowsky’s compositions frequently stage a meeting between architecture and landscape: an ivy-covered brick wall, a manicured garden, a field of lupines, or an empty bench partly absorbed by foliage. These are not simply scenic motifs. The buildings and walls stand for history, order, and what is known, while the plants suggest change, possibility, and the unpredictability of growth. Her paintings locate meaning in the space between them.
