The Art of Creation: Honing in on the Ordinary

What captures the attention of Belgian-born artist Adele Renault is the ordinary—ordinary people, pigeons, plants. But her depiction of these easily overlooked subjects is anything but ordinary. Through the use of careful detail, skillful use of lighting and shadows, and a commitment to the specificity of realism, the images she creates both on canvas and on the sides of building make people stop and take notice.

As she has explained, ”I see beauty everywhere and in everything, and for me, it was always about showing beauty where you least expect it, but the subject could have been anything. It never had to be 'special' to be painted.”

Renault, who lives part-time in Belgium and part-time in Los Angeles, uses oil paint and a spray can on both canvas and on the walls of buildings to bring into focus patterns of pigeon feathers, veins of a leaf, wrinkles of a person's skin. This intense focus gives viewers an entryway into a new perspective on these subjects. Whether the result is a five-foot-high framed canvas or fifty-foot-high mural, the commonplace becomes exotic as viewers shrink and what is being viewed grows larger.

With her current series, Plantasia, she brings this type of focus to the everyday around her. In canvas paintings such as that of the cactus at the beginning of this post, the details (in this case the spines) seem to pop right out of the canvas. In the ones pictured below, you can almost feel the texture of the leaves wrapping the walls where her murals have been painted.

Left: Dents de lion (Lion’s teeth), Dandelion, Gent, 2022, Adele Renault; Right: Stinging Nettle, Ankarsrum, Sweden, 2021, Adele Renault.

The works have a three-dimensional quality that is astonishing. It is hard to believe that the textures and dimensions are created by the spraying of different colored paints on a flat surface.

For her paintings, the photographs she takes and uses to create her pieces are foundational. Because her style is photo-realistic, the angle, lighting, composition, and perspective of the photographs guides how she approaches her painting.

None of the plants she chooses to feature, such as cabbage, stinging nettle, and chard, are exotic to where she lives. This is the point for her. She chooses her subjects not because they are rare, but because they are abundant. It is through her craft and imagination that the viewer discovers intricacies and intrigue in homely flora which they have probably overlooked when coming across them in an empty lot or garden bed.

Before she launched her current series on plants in 2021, Renault was well-known for her portraits of pigeons. She traces her history of painting pigeons by pointing out that she first painted full portraits of pigeons. After doing that for a while, she became fascinated with the colors and patterns of their feathers and began painting huge wall murals in which she zoomed in on just the feathers.

Eventually, she "felt the need to zoom back a bit, to capture a bit of that silly expression pigeon can have and the sparkle in their eyes." As a result, her paintings began to take in wider views of the pigeons. This movement back and forth seems a bit like looking through a magnifying glass. The very close-up perspective helps see detail you wouldn't see otherwise; move a little further out and you see how the details fit together to make a larger whole. Alternate between perspectives and you put it all together and get the benefit of both perspectives.

This ability to change perspective is a great way to see and appreciate the intricate details that come together in any part of creation. The intricacy of a feather is amazing; the fact that these feathers are a part of the entire bird deepens the awe a single member of creation calls for.

The pigeons she paints are not generic. They are particular pigeons, with stories and characteristics that Renault knows and shares along with her paintings. She has, for instance, done an entire series on a particular pigeon named "Camp."

In the same way, her portraits of people are specific and particular. One series she has done, West Adams Portraits, featured the neighbors around her home in Los Angeles. Each person's name and story were part of what she was telling as she painted the portraits. This type of portrait requires a deep investment from her personally and as an artist, so much so that after finishing this type of series, she will shift into a different subject matter for a time.

It makes sense that giving this deep attention to someone or something is intense. This type of caring requires that you set your own self aside for a while as you notice what makes the other itself. She sees her work, in part, as a way to draw people's attention to the less eye-catching parts of nature that are all around us, for they are worth noticing.

The artist describes an ecological side to her work in this way: "... when I cover a building in a green leaf, well, I'm quite literally letting nature envelop and reclaim a bit of manufactured concrete. Even though it’s not eco graffiti and spray paint isn’t quite 'green nature' taking over, but it can at least symbolize it and inspire people for a greener future."

You can see more of Adele Renault's work on her website.

Feel free to leave a comment below or contact me directly at louise.conner@circlewood.online.

Louise