Renee McGinnis

I've been creating art my entire life. My mother tells the story of how I would get into her purse as a toddler, find her lipstick, and start drawing on the sheets on the bed. Eventually, she wanted to save her sheets, so she started buying me art supplies as a little girl. I was one of those children who was just born an artist. I grew up on a farm about 85 miles southwest of Chicago, in the middle of nowhere, and before I showed art, I showed cattle. In high school, I did all sorts of things including sign painting and portraits, and it seemed like everybody in the community knew I was capable at a young age. After earning my BFA in painting and printmaking from Illinois Wesleyan University in 1980, I moved directly into graphic design because I needed a job. I ended up as a designer in broadcasting for WGN Television in Chicago, designing graphics for the news on the 9 o'clock show, which left my days free to paint. I also did illustrations for Encyclopedia Britannica, including illustrating the first article by Stephen Hawking in the yearbook for science and future. For the last 25 years or so, I've been trying to boil down what it is about our species, the qualities and tendencies of our species, and produce work that once viewed maybe 100 years after my death, viewers will understand this particular part of human history that I'm living in right now. I paint things like a decaying superstructure on a vast polar landscape surrounded by the beauty of flowers and fauna, creating a contrast in climates where the hand of man is involved. I'm always digging around at human folly. We are a brilliant species, yet I'm trying to turn the viewers inward to take a look at the stupid stuff we do. It's sort of like a mirror. I want to compliment our species and have hope, but I also want to point at some of the things that we do. I've dealt with war and overpopulation, all sorts of issues over the decades, and I've given lectures in high schools about these things. I'm represented by Zg Gallery in Chicago, and my work is in the collection of the Fort Wayne Museum of Art.