Rooted in a lifelong passion for colour and composition, Rebecca's art spans still life, landscapes, and abstracted narratives, often infused with personal experiences and a deep appreciation for materiality. From childhood influences in New York and Maine to a global perspective shaped by years of travel and cultural exchange, the creative journey has been shaped by an ever-evolving curiosity. Whether exploring the emotional depth of colour, the meditative process of egg tempera painting, or the power of storytelling through objects, the work is a testament to an artist who continuously challenges, refines, and reimagines the act of making. 

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How has your upbringing or cultural heritage shaped the themes and techniques you explore in your art today?

I grew up in New York and spent summers on a small island off the coast of Maine. I was lucky to have a mother who is a textile artist and who facilitated my creative path and understood that making is a valuable pursuit.  I was a good student and an athlete, but making things was what I wanted to do more than anything else.  I would do my homework, go to my gymnastics practice and then get out my paints or pastels and turn our living room or the kitchen table into my studio. I was selected to be in a high school afterschool art class as a younger student and that gave me license and the confidence to see myself as an artist.  We learned to work from observation and once that seed was planted that is how I worked. I looked for relationships of colour and shape and worked from them. I think the domestic scene was the obvious motif I found, because that is what I had to look at. Then in Maine the landscape and my mother’s garden invited me to respond. At first, I worked in pastel because I had access to pastels. They were easy to tidy away and they were pure colour, which is what excites me. I wasn’t taught how to use them. I just drew what I saw and found solutions that worked for me. I went to museums regularly as a child, with my mother and with school. One of my favourite classes as a pre-teen was a sketching class where we went to the Metropolitan Museum and drew. I was drawn to Matisse, Bonnard and Vuillard and they showed me how to look, how to use colour and that banal subject matter could become electric. I didn’t envisage that I would be an artist, but I knew lots of successful artists, so it wasn’t off the table.  They would talk to me about their work, and I would show them mine and that made the process of becoming an artist organic.  My favourite contemporary artists were painters so when I was at Stanford, in my freshman year, I signed up for a life drawing class and a painting class. My professors were Bay Area painters and their approach to teaching was to say that we should forget what we know each time we begin a new piece. As a seventeen year old, this was a frustrating take on teaching, but now I understand that in order to develop your own voice and make authentic work, not knowing and not thinking too much works best for me. There was plenty of work that was much more abstract than the work I made, and that was confusing, but it also guided me in believing in my own voice. This lesson has helped me through periods of uncertainty and taught me that for me the ‘work’ of painting is tied to finding what you want to say and how you want to say it, not a formulaic approach.

How do you reignite creativity during those inevitable periods of self-doubt or stagnation?

My Masters in Education was about why and how women don’t believe in their creativity.  The context of my dissertation was in a classroom setting, but the themes are relevant in the making of art too. I learned that I was not alone, and that self-doubt is a state of mind that can be trained out of us. I learned that if we make our practice more transparent others feel more empowered and the vicious cycle of competition fades. We all need encouragement, and I got plenty of that as a child. I find that facilitating others to use their creativity gives me a buzz and can be a catalyst to the next thing for me. Creativity begets creativity. For years I was an avid mail artist.  Exchanging ideas with other mail artists in the form of visual communication sparked visual conversations and sometimes a mail artist gave me an idea that went on to be something important in the next thing I did in my painting and drawing practice. This is a bit like leafing through magazines or cookbooks. Being in someone else’s head can trigger my own ideas. At my mature age, my self-doubt is an inconvenience, not something that swallows me up. It usually results from a comparison someone makes, or I make, which causes me to feel inert. There are other truths to channel at that time.  ‘Art is subjective’ is my favourite mantra. Visiting a museum and seeing a body of work has helped me to imagine the next steps in my own. Equally letting another artist’s work wash over me is utterly inspiring. I can barely wait to get home and apply the feelings, explore the colours on my own. Not being selected for things is hard for all of us and I am not immune, but when it happens, I work a little harder, set up a more challenging still life, think up a new project, make lists of things to do and delete the email that informed me of my failure. Taking things personally is a destructive response and I understand the importance of finding a silver lining in setbacks rather than dwelling on them. Recently I took a whole bunch of my old oil canvasses to the dump. Out of sight, out of mind, is a good tactic for me! And begin again works sometimes.  Changing the scale of what I am working on, giving myself a time limit so I make raw, unfinished pieces can teach me things.  These tactics help to refresh me when I am feeling bogged down.

How important is it for viewers to understand the intended message of your work? Does ambiguity add value, or do you seek clarity in your expression?

I recognise that my mind construes things in its own idiosyncratic way. What interests me may not interest you.  One thing is for certain, though, I can’t finish a painting until it has meaning for me.  I don’t do laborious drawings or work out what a painting is going to be until I am in it. But, if I am not sure by the end of the painting what I am saying or what my focus is, the painting isn’t working and I need to discover the meaning. I am my audience. I don’t expect my viewer to think like me, though.  Sometimes when I am near my work in a show, I will get the feeling that the viewer craves a conversation.  `Perhaps this is to align what they are seeing with what I might mean. I like to talk about my work and will explain the process I went through to make the painting and what was in my head as I finished it.  But my process and what I mean feels incidental to what my viewer is seeing.  People usually talk about the colours and the patterns when they respond to my work, and I want them to make their own meaning. I did a series of Hope and Joy paintings in the autumn. I chose those words as a nod to the Harris Walz campaign but also because when I paint, I like what I am looking at to engender something positive, setting up objects that inspire positive feelings was a satisfying proposition. I wondered if I could convey that specifically.  All the titles during the project had at least one of the words ‘HOPE’ or ‘JOY’ in them and anecdotally my audience commented that the work made them happy. I think people often feel they like work more when it seems relevant to them.  People who buy my work often have an affinity with one of the objects or one of the colours or can relate it to something in their past, or something that they value. Unless it’s a commission, making work that people will relate to is not much of a consideration for me as I am working, though. When I set up work it begins with colour or perhaps because I have a new object or a new pattern that I want to interrogate.  I move things around, substitute things in and out until I feel excited, happy, entertained or swoon. Then, as I work, I do more of that until the painting feels tuned and harmonious. I research objects, look for aleatoric meaning until I understand the explicit of my intuitive choices. 

Can you take us through the evolution of an artwork, from that first spark of inspiration to the finished piece?

I am involved in an initiative at Benton End, the former home of the East Anglian painting school where Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett Haines lived, outside of Hadleigh. In the run up to the project, I visited a special Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines exhibit at Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury. After the show, while whizzing through the gift shops, I couldn’t resist buying a tin of biscuits with one of my favourite paintings on it.  I had noticed that in one of the paintings in the show, Cedric had put a big painting (that felt like a window) behind his still life. Doing something meta with Cedric would be my next challenge. I was in the middle of my Joy and Hope project so assembled my objects with that in mind.  I selected the Joy of Art book I had ordered from a secondhand bookshop as part of the structure of the painting. I wanted to use colours from the tin (Cedric’s colours) in the piece. There is an upholstery store in the closest shopping town, and I often buy discontinued wallpaper and upholstery books to inspire me and to use as patterns in my still life arrangements. I chose a pile of those and swapped them in and out until I had a backdrop for my objects that made sense. My slight obsession of using gold pigment has lasted more than a year and when setting this up I knew gold, pink, and a new/old poodle were musts. There were very few flowers left in my garden. Luckily, I could make them work. Before I can paint, I need to choose my support.  I usually work on MDF panels that I have gessoed with at least nine layers of gesso made with bologna chalk and rabbit skin glue. I make these up in bulk over a few days three or four times a year and it is the luck of the draw what I have on hand when I begin a painting. I decided to use an almost square panel. My work begins as blocks of colour and it is surprisingly abstract at first. Once I get the colour down I look and look to see if the colour moves my eye around enough to make things interesting. I look to see if there is some repetition of colour, different shapes and sizes of colour and if their arrangement will make the painting strong.  I have intuitively arranged some of that when I set up the still life, but laying down the colour helps me to think through whether it works or not. I try to work across the painting, so all areas have a similar level of layers.  My egg tempera paintings have many layers of paint before they are complete. I find the right side of the painting comes together quickest, even when I try not to let that happen.  I must force myself to go to the left side and sometimes II am stymied because I need to pin things down somewhere to move on to another part of the painting. This is the push and pull of the painting for me.  I find every painting different.  I can’t predict what will feel hard to paint but usually something does. In this case, the complexity behind the flowers and poodle were difficult to resolve. I moved horizon lines up and down, changed the colours I was looking at, rendered more and rendered less until it felt right. What I was looking at wasn’t exactly what I needed it to be and that is often the way and finding the compromise becomes the solution. 

Can art be truly therapeutic? Have you experienced its healing power personally, or seen it impact others?

In 2023 I was diagnosed with a chronic form of Leukaemia. It came out of the blue and made me sick and I will always have it, but I am quite well now. When first diagnosed, I was in the hospital for a week and when I got out, I couldn’t wait to assemble a still life and paint. Painting is the only thing I ever really want to do…  Finding the bright side was essential. I had an ear worm of a song I hadn’t thought about in years by a 1980s band.  The song was ‘Atsababy Life is Great’. I had had it in my head for days when I was in the hospital. Occasionally a song title or a poem comes to me, and I paint about that.  This was one of those times. That was what my painting was going to be about. Flipping something bad is how I deal with difficult situations and painting is my go-to way to do that. The way I paint is a meditative process.  Mixing egg tempera, with its ritualistic process sets the tone. I assemble my objects and decide which colours of pigment will be the colour I see.  So, a pink may become a warmer pink than what I am looking at because I decide that colour relationship will work better.  I may change a tone or a hue as I work later, but when I choose my palette, I scoop out different pigments and use a palette knife to mix a paste by adding water. Choosing the colours is a joyful process of basking in the colour relationships. It is soothing and therapeutic, for me. Of course I mix colours together too. Much about egg tempera is slow but the pace changes throughout the painting. The first gasp of a painting is a bit of a frenzy of pinning the colours down and understanding the structure.  This is a faster stage, but I am not thinking about anything. What I am looking at is going in through my eyes and out of my brush.  All thoughts are vanquished. This isn’t meditative but it does block out any other thoughts that might not be helpful.  In that way it is therapeutic. Next the paste gets mixed with egg yolk when I start painting. Adding drops of egg yolk to the pigment is like science and magic.  I like the sound and the feel of the process, and it is the start of something that is open-ended and unknown.  I like uncertainty and am curious about what will happen next.  That feels like a happy place for me. Working in egg tempera requires some patience but not a huge amount.  I think of my process as correcting once I have blocks of colour on the panel.  I carve into the colour to find the edges and relationships by looking and adjusting until it balances and feels harmonious.  Sometimes this is straightforward, sometimes it isn’t.  This can be an uncomfortable phase of the painting but determination and curiosity stand me in good stead and ultimately I have a good success rate for finishing paintings and feeling they are resolved. The success of finishing a painting, going from uncertainty to resolution is a very satisfying place to get to.  Again, solving the problem becomes therapeutic. 

In what ways has viewer feedback surprised you or shifted your perspective on your own work?

I tune out negative feedback but also like to know how my work is being received, so will sit in an exhibition and watch people’s reactions. Will they walk past or look at my work? I like to post work on social media to see what other people make of a new piece. When an exhibition goes live, I try to have an objective look to see how I feel about my work in relation to other work. Positive feedback is always a joy even if indifference or a negative stage whisper is difficult, so I like to spend as much time as possible at exhibitions in case someone wants to talk about my work or in case I am there when someone is really interested. Last summer I showed alongside four other artists at a gallery near the Suffolk coast. We have been showing together for the past three years, and the gallery gets good footfall. I spent much of the week at the gallery. I had a body of new work and when people engaged, I asked them which piece they liked best.  I got feedback from more than forty people and kept track of what they said. The variety of reactions and the breadth of favourites was interesting and surprising to me.  In any given show, I usually feel that particular pieces are ‘stronger’ than others and I expected this to be borne out. Although there were a few that were more liked, every piece had an admirer. I guess that goes to art being subjective or speaking to individuals on many different levels. Perhaps the thing that surprised me most was that I couldn’t often match which painting would be the favourite with an individual. One young man spent nearly an hour looking at my work.  He made a comment that made me test a new theory.  His favourite painting was ‘Atsababy Life is Great’, the painting I made as I left the hospital, the one that was my effort to embrace life and channel my happiness at being alive. He told me it was his favourite because it made him happy. That I could convey an emotion so strong through painting made me understand the potential of using painting to convey mood and was the birth of the joy and hope project.

In an increasingly globalized world, how can artists preserve authenticity and cultural integrity in their work?

I have lived in six countries and spent significant time travelling in others, not to mention armchair travelling through art and photographs. Each of these experiences has left its trace.  These traces make me who I am.  Just because I was born in DC, lived in Boston and then NYC until I was seventeen does not mean that I am a monolithic East Coast American. And who would that be anyway? In this globalised world although I inherited a culture from my parents: a second-generation Bronx Jew and a southerner whose distant relations came over from England on one of the first boats around the time of the Mayflower, I have become someone unique and multi-cultured through my own experiences. I live in rural Suffolk and have children who were educated in Singapore, the Netherlands and England. My internal landscape is probably of Cranberry Island in Maine but Indian miniatures, the Bay area painters, Matisse, Bonnard, Vuillard, the pink houses of Suffolk, Chinatown in Singapore, riding a bike in the Netherlands, the medieval painters of Italy; they have all changed me into this artist who draws on cultures from all the places she has spent time in and been inspired by. To me, being authentic is not about preserving cultural integrity.  I delight in the rich influences I have been lucky enough to have and hope to have future opportunities that will add depth to my work.

If you could become one of your creations for a day, which would it be and why?

Live and let live, egg tempera on panel, 22 x 30 cm, 2023

My paintings tell stories but they are often random stories – Juxtaposing disparate objects results in that. But finding the story and a title are steps that, for me, declare a painting. Days after the October 6th invasion of Israel I set up a red painting.  There was a Buddha with red paint on it, a tin, some upholstery fabric, a frame which I filled with red paper, a pomegranate, a man with orangey red knees. I picked some zinnias, Jerusalem artichokes, and feverfew from my garden and combined them with some chrysanthemums. What brought them all together for me was their otherness and the harmony that otherness reflected to the viewer. I wondered what the world would be like if we could co-exist with otherness without strife? I had a title before I even began because the objects felt so random and the painting was really about the colour. I wanted meaning, and songs arrived to help me: At first I thought of McCartney’s “When you were young, and your heart, was an open book. You used to say, live and let live.” ~ Paul McCartney but settled on Cole Porter instead. I listened in horror to what was happening in the middle east and cajoled my figures and colours to their most harmonious. Ultimately I settled on Cole Porter‘s “Live and let live, be and let be, Hear and let hear, see and let see. . . . Live and let live and remember this line: ‘Your bus’ness is your bus’ness and my bus’ness is mine.’”

Perhaps these quotes are even more apt.

“Live and let live is the rule of common justice.” ~ Roger L’Estrange

“Tell the politicians and the hustlers: live and let live.” ~ James Brown

If I could inhabit a painting, it might be this one. I would paint myself in as a gardener gathering sunflowers, perhaps. Whomever I was, it would be a world where we would all co-exist and our diversity would bring joy in its colour.

If you could live anywhere in the world to further inspire your creativity, where would it be?

When I was a Peace Corps volunteer, in my twenties, I brought a little kit of art supplies to my site.  I brought one backpack with me from NY, and my art supplies were as essential as my clothes. I lived at the base of the Kerio Valley, in Kenya.  It was exquisitely beautiful, but I didn’t have time or inclination to go far from my hut to draw. I was living in the snake capital of the world, and I am as fearful of snakes as anyone. We had been told by our trainers that we must only send positive messages home because our families and friends would worry about us and what we felt one day would be different the next and yet it would be memorialised, and people would read about one moment and believe it was the only truth. I took that to heart when I went out to draw. How could I find something positive and different to say despite what might feel like sameness? I lived in Kimwarer and taught in the local Harambee school for two + years. I ran twice a day through the bush, and drew at lunchtime and in the evenings. I had limited supplies and limited views, but I learned to see the magic in very small change and recorded what I saw.  I would go to the same place at different times, in different weather, in different seasons and the view would change. Perhaps I learned to see the views through a romantic lens. I would embellish things to make them happier, more green, more magical and reflecting that back made me love the place more and find it all the more enchanting. What I learned through my time in Kenya was that drawing could be a record, and that record could be about many things. I learned that drawing was a way to understand a place and yourself. For that reason, I don’t think I need to go to a place to be inspired.  I believe that inspiration comes from the intersection of looking and being and that it is up to me to find what I need to find in what I am looking at in order to be inspired. Yes, another trip to India to see the colours and look at the miniatures would fill my heart with joy and lead me to do something exciting, but equally figurines from the car boot sale can transport me to another time, place and space.

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For Rebecca Guyver, painting is an ongoing conversation—one that shifts between intuition and discipline, spontaneity and structure. Each piece begins with a search, an arrangement of colour and form that slowly reveals its own meaning. Whether through the ritual of mixing egg tempera, the meditative process of layering pigment, or the quiet thrill of solving a composition, the act of painting is as much about discovery as it is about expression. Some works come easily, others resist; some take shape through careful observation, others demand risk and reinvention. But in the end, the process itself is what fuels the next idea, the next painting, the next story waiting to be told.