Short Answer Sunday: Rachel Jeffers

Meant to elicit quick, intuitive responses, Short Answer Sunday will introduce readers to a wide variety of artists, educators, writers, curators, art enthusiasts and art adjacent individuals whose inclinations I admire. With the intent of getting to know the person behind the artwork as well generating new avenues to artistic discovery, participants may respond with only a few words or an artist’s name, always with the opportunity to elaborate if they wish!

What a delight to get lost in a painting, to be confused and amused and surrender to color, form, pattern, light. Rachel Jeffers’ painterly still lifes offer so much of this smart, giddy, retinal pleasure. Sinks & dishes, lunches about to be eaten, a fried egg in a luminous skillet (the sleepy, muted spatula next to this orange glow really gets me), floral arrangements, slinking house cats, puzzles in process, and the reflective glow of Christmas lights (a personal favorite) are all explored and elevated in Rachel’s compositions. The paintings’ surfaces contain traces of the painting process, in which marks and forms are built, layered, or obliterated over time (sharing a bit of kinship with Richter’s Tisch).

The subjects in Rachel’s paintings may be casual domestic scenes, however they are developed in such a way that they become extraordinary worlds. In these worlds, mimesis and playful expression mingle, and pictorial depth expands and collapses. In her interview, Rachel shares that she would like to live in one of Vuillard’s interiors for a week (fully support this). If given the opportunity, I would like to live in one of Rachel’s paintings and I’d choose this one. Just look for me in the middle, playing in the paint.

Last week, I saw Rachel’s phenomenal show Monday Alchemy at Foyer and highly recommend that all those in the Richmond area make a trip to see her work in person. The show is up through May 29, with an artist talk on May 21 . A friend of the blog, Rachel was also interviewed on Art Habit by Nikki in 2023 (check it out, if you missed it). I so appreciate Rachel’s honest and insightful responses for Short Answer Sunday and I know that you will, too.

For more about Rachel Jeffers and her work, head on over to her website and follow her on Instagram.

xo, Lauren

Name: Rachel Jeffers
Occupation: Artist
Astrological data: Scorpio sun, Virgo moon, Taurus rising
Hometown: Tennessee
Current location: Richmond, VA

Other than Instagram, how do you find new-to-you artists?

When artists I like are in group shows, I look up the other artists in the show, which often leads me to more galleries, and then to more artists.

An artwork that makes you laugh?

The Ham by Paul Gauguin. The first time I saw this at The Phillips Collection, I was fresh out of grad school, and going through a lot of turmoil about what painting is for. The message I had absorbed was that for art to be meaningful, it had to be ‘Important’. I turned the corner and came upon this absurd painting - of course still life has been around forever, but there was something so surprising about the formality with which he treated a slab of ham. This painting reminded me that there are many ways for painting to have meaning.

Paul Gauguin, The Ham, 1889, oil on canvas, 19 3/4 x 22 3/4 in

An artwork that makes you cry?

I have a hard time looking at Picasso’s Guernica.

Most underrated artist?

Childe Hassam. Georges Braque

An artwork that you’d like to live inside for a week?

Any of Vuillard’s interiors. I’d especially like if I could blend into the wallpaper and just observe without being noticed.

Edouard Vuillard, The Flowered Dress, 1891, oil on canvas, 38 x 46 cm

An artist whose work you can’t stop thinking about?

Lisa Sanditz has been a favorite since I saw her show Sock City at CRG Gallery in 2008.

What’s your favorite characteristic in an artwork?

Color, evidence of the hand, seeing residue of the painter’s decision-making process, and ideally, a composition that arrives at an unexpected solution in combining all of these elements

What’s an artwork that doesn’t look like art?

I really like Richard Tuttle’s work.

Richard Tuttle, Sylva Head, 2020, plywood, spray paint, wood glue, and nails, 21 x 15 1/8 x 2 inches

Fav monograph or art book?

Drawings of Jim Dine
Cindy Sherman The Complete Untitled Film Stills
Tina Barney Theater of Manners
Alex Katz Collages
The Hours of Catherine of Cleves

Fav museum or gallery in your current location?

VMFA

An artwork that packs a spiritual punch?

Alison Hall’s paintings. You have to see them in person. Fra Angelico Entombment

An artwork that you’d like to see before you die?

I would’ve answered Impression Sunrise by Monet, but I got to see that last year when it came to DC. Another answer would’ve been Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit but I saw that in Boston in 2019. I think next on my list has to be Matisse’s Woman with a Hat.

What art material do you love to nerd out on?

Color wheels and color charts. My training in color theory was based on the Munsell System. It reminds me of a lot of musical scales and music theory. I don’t understand why everyone isn’t as excited as I am about color wheels.

What was the last thing that you listened to in the studio?

I’ve had Grimes’s 2020 album, Miss Anthropecene on a constant loop for the past couple of months.

What’s a book that changed your life?

The Alphabet Versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain

What song, book, podcast or film do you think everyone should know about?

2 books that made a huge impact on me are Deborah Tannen’s That’s Not What I Meant! and You Just Don’t Understand
They’re not art books, but they’re about language, and the subtle differences in communication styles that lead to misunderstandings. I love anything to do with linguistics, grammar, and psychology. It’s one thing I really enjoy about painting, the infinite number of ways there are to say one thing.

❤

Rachel Jeffers holds an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art's Mount Royal School of Art and a BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design. She studied with Turps Correspondence Course and is now a course mentor. Her work has been exhibited throughout the Eastern US, with recent appearances at Shockoe Artspace, Stay Home Gallery, and My Pet Ram. Her current solo show, Monday Alchemy, is on view at Foyer Gallery until May 29. She is a member of Zeuxis: A Collective of Still Life Painters. She lives and works in the Richmond, VA area.

You can find out more about Rachel Jeffers and her work on her website and on Instagram.

Short Answer Sunday: Sara Tuttle

Meant to elicit quick, intuitive responses, Short Answer Sunday will introduce readers to a wide variety of artists, educators, writers, curators, arts professionals, art enthusiasts and art adjacent individuals whose inclinations I admire. With the intent of getting to know the person behind the artwork as well generating new avenues to artistic discovery, participants may respond with only a few words or an artist’s name, always with the opportunity to elaborate if they wish!

Sara Tuttle is an accomplished artist, the Founder/Director of Foyer Gallery, and a really terrific person to talk to about art. As the connotations of the name suggest, Foyer is welcoming and also cool (not an easy act for a contemporary art gallery, but probably an ideal that more should emulate imho). Sara has a keen eye for contemporary painting and Foyer provides Richmond with a much-needed exhibition space that consistently highlights exceptional local and regional artists, all while making an effort to make art accessible to new viewers and collectors.

Sara’s own oeuvre of tactile paintings reflect and respond to the rhythms of domestic life. These paintings are abstractions, sure, but in the way that Miriam Schapiro’s femmages are abstractions, both thing and image, and a reinterpretation of items that are collected, recycled and made new. They give me flashbacks (sentimental and urgent) of the red-eyed, frenetic days (and nights) of early parenthood, evoked in equal measure by the paintings’ bright, rhythmic patterns and their title-induced associations (for better or worse, the intro song to Dinosaur Train will forever echo through my brain at unexpected intervals).

I know you’ll enjoy Sara Tuttle’s Short Answer Sunday interview—her responses are dynamite (for the record we also stan jangly, depressive dad rock & Adrianne Lenker in the SAS house)!

Find out more about Sara Tuttle on her website, at Foyer and on Instagram.

xo, Lauren

Name: Sara Tuttle
Occupation: Artist and Founder/Director of Foyer Gallery
Astrological data: I'm astrologically illiterate!
Hometown: Connecticut
Current location: Richmond, VA

Other than Instagram, how do you find new-to-you artists?

Word of mouth/other artists and exhibitions. 

 

An artwork that makes you laugh?

There are a good number of European royal portraits that make me giggle. 

 

An artwork that makes you cry?

Alice Neel’s portraits of mothers and their children – they’re so real and raw and it makes me remember just how fleeting my kids’ young childhood is!

 

Alice Neel, Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia), 1982
Lithograph in colors on Arches paper
33.5 x 30.625 in.
Image source

An artwork that you'd like to live inside for a week?

Any Andrew Wyeth landscape painting – take me to Maine, please. 

 

An artist whose work you can't stop thinking about?

Usually whichever artist is currently exhibiting in my gallery. It is a very cool experience as an artist myself to get to spend every week for a few months immersed in an exhibition of another artist’s work. My favorite piece in the show always changes by the end of the show and that’s also a fun journey. 

 

What's your favorite characteristic in an artwork?

An element of surprise/a sense of the process - the feeling that the final image may have even surprised the artist!

 

What's an artwork that you suspect that you shouldn't like, but you do (guilty pleasure)?

People denounce Richard Prince’s series where he prints his screenshots of (usually women’s) instagram selfies after writing the most recent comment as anti-feminist etc. (I think there may have even been copyright lawsuits?) But I think that the series brings up the public domain nature of social media and the blurring of the concept of ‘authorship’ that comes with the internet. The ultimate troll ‘art’? Totally. But I find it to be a striking social commentary about how once you put a picture out there you can’t control how it might be used. A famous artist could make money off of it! It raises questions that are even more pertinent today with AI constantly scraping images off of the internet.

 

What's an artwork that you secretly hate?

I’m going to respectfully keep these (strong) opinions to myself ;) 

 

Most insane art piece?

Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights is up there – I cannot believe that was painted in the late 15th/early 16th century. 

 

Fav monograph or art book?

Anything Amy Sillman.

 

Fav museum or gallery in your current city?

VMFA for museum. For galleries (other than Foyer ;)) I’d have to say that Main Projects has been putting on consistently impressive exhibitions!

 

Last exhibition you saw irl?

A bunch of great shows at other galleries around Richmond - There’s always a good show somewhere in our town!

 

An artwork that packs a spiritual punch?

Fra Angelico’s frescoes or DeKooning’s landscapes

 

Fra Angelico, The Mocking of Christ, 1440 - 1441, fresco
Basilica di San Marco, Florence, Italy
Image Source

An artwork that you'd like to see before you die?

The Ghent altarpiece.

 

What art material do you love to nerd out on?

The art store “Supply”, a few blocks down from Foyer, sells transparent spray paint. I want to play with it more I love working in mixed-media layers.

 

What was the last thing that you listened to in the studio?

Always music and it depends on what my current obsession is. I will listen to an album over and over and over again until I wear it out and can’t listen to it again for a few years. Listening to something I’m familiar with helps me focus in the studio. Genre-wise I usually fall back on some kind of indie dude-rock or shoe-gazey band with a driving beat – I’m basic and a sucker for a jangly guitar. Or slightly depressive dad-rock/Americana with guitar solos that are self-indulgently long ;) 

 

What song, book, podcast or film do you think everyone should know about?

I think Big Thief/Adrianne Lenker is making some of the most beautiful and arresting music of the past decade.

❤

Sara Tuttle’s most recent body of work is inspired by motherhood and the domestic environment. She received a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Richmond in 2009 and an MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2017. She completed the Summer Studio Program at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2009 and taught high school art at Church Hill Academy for three years. Tuttle has exhibited four solo exhibitions in Richmond, VA most recently “In The Thick of It” at Shockoe Artspace in the Fall of 2024. Group exhibitions include “Those Who Tend” at Warnes Contemporary in New York City and “Limbo” at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, OR. In June 2025, Sara founded Foyer Gallery in downtown Richmond, VA where she showcases exceptional work by both emerging and mid-career artists, most of whom are from the region.  

For more, find her on Instagram, at Foyer and her on her website.