Helen Rae

Born 1938 in Claremont, CA; died 2021

Helen Rae has been creating art since 1990 at First Street Gallery and Art Center, a progressive art studio for adults with developmental disabilities, now located in Upland, CA.

Her drawings, in colored pencil and graphite, are immediately striking for their vivid imagery, resonant use of color and innovative reworking of source material. Using fashion advertisements as a point of departure for otherworldly journeys into the subconscious, Helen transforms the original images into something uniquely expressive, which possess a strange beauty and power.

Helen’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions throughout the United States, Scotland, Belgium, Japan and Paris and she has received features in Vogue, Vulture, and The Los Angeles Times among many other publications.

In the The Los Angeles Times, critic David Pagel observed: “The electrifying energy that pulses through her pictures gives form to a cosmos that is not anthropocentric. Humanists might be terrified by this perspective. It flies in the face of everything egotists live for. But it’s also thrilling. In the 18th century, philosophers described the combination of excitement and terror as sublime. Today, that term has fallen out of fashion. But it captures the alien beauty of Rae’s art. Her drawings have their roots in fashion magazines. She tears out full-page spreads and uses a pencil to roughly sketch their contours on sheets of paper. She then sets to work with colored pencils. Rae draws like she means it. Her colors are saturated and dense. Her lines decisive. The scarcity of shading gives her images uncompromising intensity. Her laser focus is vivid in the abundance of detail, particularly in the complex patterns of the fabrics she selects and edits, judiciously simplifying some elements and making others more complex, irregular, mind-blowing. Rae flattens volumes, collapses space and fractures planes in ways that make Picasso’s Cubism seem amateurish. So convincing is her vision of things that after looking at four or five drawings you feel like an alien — out of place in a world that shares significant features with everyday reality but is charged with a kind of sizzling energy that is both exhausting and intoxicating."