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Discover / Meet the Artist
Interview with Rachael Tarravechia
“Art inherently is political. The personal is political. The body is political.”
Featuring
30.09.2025
Rachael Tarravechia builds worlds that blur memory, narrative, and space. Drawing from early fascinations with horror films, anime, and video games, her practice explores how architecture and objects can hold energy, becoming both sanctuary and threshold. Each painting is a constructed world, layered with collaged beginnings, cinematic influence, and the tension between what is revealed and what is withheld. At the center of her work lies a reflection on choice, presence, and the power of constructed environments to speak to vulnerability, identity, and imagination.
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How has your upbringing or cultural heritage shaped the themes and techniques you explore in your art today?
Growing up in a family with three brothers, I quickly learned that my siblings and I were not the same. Even from a young age, I felt an innate difference in treatment and child-rearing due to me being a girl, which shaped the habits I struggle with to this day. My favorite escapes were horror movies, HGTV, anime, and video games. Video games allowed me to leave my feminine form while traversing the fantastical landscapes of Final Fantasy, NeoPets, Okami, and Kingdom Hearts. These games presented me with endless choices of how to proceed, and what kind of game I wanted to play. Choices that I felt in real life were already decided by everyone around me. Worldbuilding became an integral pillar of my practice. Walls hold energy and can become sacred or foreboding spaces.
How do you reconcile the tension between raw, innate creativity and the discipline required to master your craft?
It’s very difficult sometimes to focus enough to really hone in one idea, and execute it! Even though flurries of inspiration can be huge motivation boosts, it can cause me to freeze since I end up feeling so overwhelmed. To combat this, I try to write down all my ideas, start with the one that’s speaking to me the loudest, and make myself see it through. I’ve only ever abandoned a couple paintings over the years, since I think the discipline of completing something from start to finish is key. Pushing through those tough moments when a painting starts looking awkward is what’s going to make you a better painter!
How do you reignite creativity during those inevitable periods of self-doubt or stagnation?
Whenever I’m in a creative lull, I make sure to keep painting, even if I’m not excited about the work. I look at my practice as a lifestyle. You can’t just stop doing it. You can give yourself grace, and not be hard on yourself for not loving everything you make, but keeping the habit of working will eventually help pull you out of the lull. This is especially important for the self doubt aspect as well! Even when you’re down on yourself, your art is still so important!
Do you think art should have a political or ideological agenda?
Art inherently is political. The personal is political. The body is political. My work draws on themes surrounding the societal expectations placed on women and girls, and the resulting physical and emotional violence we face because of that. I don’t think visually the works read as obviously political, but those issues have been politicized. With the current administration in power, our free speech is being threatened on a daily basis. It’s crucial for us artists to continue sharing our thoughts, experiences, and opinions through our work.
How do you measure the impact of your work—by its reception, its personal meaning, or something else?
The personal meaning and satisfaction that I get from a work is definitely how I measure its impact and success! External validation is nice, don’t get me wrong, but nothing comes close to truly feeling proud of something you made. I’ve noticed that the works I tend to feel more strongly about are also the ones where they had a bit of an ugly duckling phase. Taking a risk by painting something in a new way, or trying to push perspective. In addition to these aesthetic gambles, I also felt more attached to the pieces where I developed the narrative of the scene more.
Can you take us through the evolution of an artwork, from that first spark of inspiration to the finished piece?
As cheesy as this may sound, I’ll randomly get flashes of an idea in my head. It can range from just seeing the word, (for example, seeing the word “guillotine” and that's it) to seeing a whole flushed out image (carousel horse on a beach post storm). I have a notes app page filled with these ideas. After I decide which concept I’m going with, I usually comb through either my own photographs of places I’ve been, or I “go hunting” on Zillow. I use the 3D tour feature to move around homes across the country, adjusting my camera angle until I have the shot I want. Then I screenshot it, pop it into photoshop, and start collaging. All my paintings are first digital collages. I then draw them on canvas, and start building up thin layers of paint to layer with. Embellishment is the very last step!
How has your artistic style transformed over the years? Are there specific influences, experiments, or moments that marked a turning point?
I believe that I found my voice as an artist while I was pretty young, because my work hasn’t dramatically changed. Looking back at my undergrad works, I think it’s very obvious I’m the same artist. My work used to be much more collage inspired, with a distinct lack of unified perspective or light source. It was a much more literal copy of the digital collages that I still create before starting on the physical painting. Over the years, as my technical skills developed, I’ve been able to more successfully paint what i actually wanted to convey. The spatial interaction between the architecture of the space and the objects within them were integral to the narrative, and world I wanted to build. The focus of my paintings shifted from just the visible objects, to the entire scene and beyond. Cinema and story telling started playing a much larger inspiration in my practice. What you can’t see is just as important as what you can see.
If you could live anywhere in the world to further inspire your creativity, where would it be?
Definitely in Japan! That would be a dream come true.
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Through a practice rooted in worldbuilding, Rachael Tarravechia transforms fleeting sparks of inspiration into layered narratives that invite both introspection and dialogue. The work resists simple interpretation, balancing discipline with spontaneity, beauty with unease, and clarity with ambiguity. What emerges is not only a reflection of personal history, but also a call to consider the spaces we inhabit—physical, emotional, and imagined.