Emily Teague Sinnet, Rainbow Bakery’s most recent featured artist, thrives when there is some unpredictability in her artistic process.
“Local Phenomena,” Sinnet’s collection of paintings completed in the winter of 2014, demonstrated the use of oil, water and soap to create colorful, abstract portraits of “the beauty and the sadness” of life in “wasted communities” in the rural Midwest.
“The great thing about the soap and incorporating non-paint mediums is that you don’t know how it’s going to turn out,” Sinnet said.
Soap pulls pigment out of paints when the two are combined on a canvas.
The amount of paint, water and soap and the type of each material used will all affect whether the color transfers in an opaque sheet, or in speckles and dots, Sinnet said.
Sinnet described her process as “constantly re-evaluating what I have, having to be hyper-focused.”
Instead of working from an image in her mind to create “Local Phenomena,” Sinnet said she chose colors and based the rest of the finished work in the parts of the paint-and-soap reactions she liked.
“It’s a constant back-and-forth where I’m stepping back to re-evaluate the painting, but it has to be fast because I’m working with oil and paint,” Sinnet said.
Another painting, “Re: 3-5-9,” is on display in the Ivy Tech John Waldron Arts Center with the National Society of Arts & Letters in the Education Center.
Sinnet said she remembers having a variety of materials spread out in the studio and accidentally spilling tea on a piece of gessobord, a wooden canvas.
“I liked the shape of it, the transparency, where it fell,” she said. “I liked the way it looked.”
The accidental tea stain became the base layer of a forest landscape with a figure in it.
Sinnet said she contacted Rainbow Bakery about a year ago about displaying her work in the store. She even sold a piece at an exhibit the bakery had Friday night to feature the work before it is moved out at the end of January.
Not every piece in the “Local Phenomena” exhibit showed at Rainbow Bakery. Some larger pieces didn’t fit the available space.
Sinnet said she hopes to display the collection again — possibly in full.
In the meantime she is searching for more opportunities to showcase her work in the spring and summer. Sinnet hails from Greencastle, Indiana, and has focused recent work on rural life.
She has chipped away at a new body of work since June while completing her master’s degree in art administration, which will be finished in May.
“It’s a lot of rural-inspired work,” she said.
The collection incorporates quilt pieces, embroidery, flowers and flower pressing, and grave rubbings.
The 3-D materials are a change for Sinnet, who mainly used quick-drying mediums as an undergrad.
“My process was so demanding, previously,” she said. “It’s nice to have a new process that works with my academic schedule. I can pick it up again.”
