Former psychologist has studied art at ccsf as well as several independent studios including formerly Leighten studios, 23rd street studios in S.F, BACAA in San Carlos and several other independent teachers. I am currently focusing on oil landscapes.

Renee McKenna, MA, lives and works in the Sunset District of San Francisco with her husband, 2 children and their dog.  Renee divides her time between her private hypnotherapy practice, teaching art to children, working with Art in Every Classroom, Inc, the non-profit that she helped found and doing her own artwork nights and weekends.

Renee's love of the sky, the sea and the city of San Francisco is reflected in her work. She has worked in acrylic for many years, and recently began experimenting with alcohol ink. 

 Though Renee is an accomplished painter and sculptor, her first love is public art.  Renee has many painted murals and mosaics in the Sunset District, including the 400 square foot tile mosaic at the South Sunset Playground  title "Nature Stream.". 

IN DIFFERENT LIGHT

I have been obsessed with photography since I was 12.  My challenge back then was, as it still is now, to present a perspective of our world that is just different enough for the viewer to take notice.  In our everyday lives we often gain insight into a problem that had been confounding us simply by taking a different approach, or if we are lucky enough, see the answer through another person's eyes.  In reality that answer had been there all along, waiting for us to discover.  Similarly, a scene that is considered mundane may become interesting under different conditions.  Those conditions could be anything - time of day, angle of view, the mindset of the viewer, the mood of the photographer.

So it is with these images that I welcome you to see our world in a different light.

I am a mixed media artist based in Northern California. My work blends conventional and unconventional materials, paints, colored pencil, book pages, inks, paper and found objects, into two and three dimensional works. Various techniques, painting, cutting, gluing, sanding and assembling found objects create my layered textures on wood panels and sculptural forms.

I love challenges, experimenting with disparate media and developing new techniques and skills. I believe in recycling and upcycling and adore texture, paints of any kind and flea market supplies. Through each step that leads to a finished surface, I try to bring out the relationship between differing objects, colors and textures; with each mistake being an irreplaceable component of my process. Figurative forms, letters and numbers are often incorporated into my work, as a graphic element or to convey a thought or theme. I am inspired by found objects, fragments of antique treasures, and everyday manufactured materials that were never intended to be art. 

My days of losing words

I have had chronic migraine since June 2008. Without medication, the pain makes me lose the ability to speak; with medication, I have side effects that cause me to forget words. For My Days of Losing Words, I created color photographs that act as synthetic memories of my lost words and this time of being inarticulate and in pain. The one-word titles refer to words that got lost in a netherworld between pain and sanity. The self-portraits remain (inarticulately) untitled.

I never stop shooting. I carried a list of words that I’ve lost over time, and when I saw something that jogged my memory of a word, I shot it and crossed the word off. Early on in the illness, I was stuck either in my house or in medical spaces for months on end, so I started shooting words there. This early work consists mainly of three types of images: domestic still lifes; documentary images of medical spaces; and self-portraits at home and in medical spaces.

For a long time, I thought my headache was as good as it was going to get—constant, low-grade pain. Thanks to a medical breakthrough, I now finally have days without pain. This has meant the inclusion of new work that shows how my life has improved. Natural light, once rare in my photos, began to creep in and take over the images at the end of the series. The tunnel vision of my earlier photographs gave way to space, light, and, eventually, the vast expanse of a new horizon.

I am showing in SOMA with photographer, Gwen Fuller and abstract painter, Rick Fisher:

My photography shows what I see in my daily life. I try my best to look for offbeat, Americana, or anything that strikes me as odd or different. 

Life’s ambiguities, human behavior, love, loss and longing have become the subject matter for my artwork. The images that result mimic tableau photography. They are realized through my personal successes and failures as an artist, teacher, traveler, twin and lover. Found objects speak to me like the words of a poem. The narratives/stories evolve through an intense engagement with materials, art history, attention to detail and the search for meaningful content. These images are intended to amuse the viewer through open-ended interpretations. Ideas come to me not as tangible thoughts but as ideas and events that happened as the result of unconscious and intuitive reactions.

Working in limited space I position objects like the actors on a stage, with a momentary pause in the action. The camera records this action which seems closer to sculpture and painting than photography. Using only natural sun light, my 35mm camera and found objects, I insert myself into the dialogue created by the objects. The collage techniques coupled with bright contrasting colors make the photographs appear other worldly, yet with elements of realism. The process to create a single image can take up to 3 months from start to finish. The resulting images reveal and conceal ideas that rely on the viewer’s personal experiences for interpretation. Often, the staged objects create a mood, a feeling of expectation that something has just happened—or is about to.

I am lucky to be an artist.