I am excited to share that I have been selected as Trumbull Art Gallery’s Artist of the Month for January 2019. Trumbull Art Gallery is located on the square in downtown Warren, Ohio.
Here’s a link to a Vindicator article about my work: http://www.vindy.com/news/2019/jan/03/kinsman-resident-rebecca-nieminen-is-tru/
A collection of my framed landscape prints will be displayed at the gallery and offered for sale throughout the month. Below are some of the images that will be featured:
This is my artist’s statement that will accompany the TAG display:
Since childhood I’ve felt an immense appreciation for nature and have been inspired and amazed by the beauty that unfolds around me each day, from misty dawn to rosy dusk. It may sound cliché, but if I’m fortunate enough to witness a glorious sunset or glimpse a fat, orange moon rising between the trees, I feel lucky to be alive. No matter how disparaging the headlines and no matter what personal troubles plague me, I know I can always turn to nature for both solace and rejuvenation.
It was my affinity with and admiration for nature that led me into landscape photography. With a bachelor’s degree in journalism (1998) and a master’s degree in English (2010), I spent years building a professional life based upon the written word (as both a reporter and a college writing instructor). In 2013, however, I made a career switch and waded into the world of portrait and wedding photography. Although my business, Storyteller Photography: Images by Rebecca, operates as a portrait studio, it is my landscape photography that has gained the most local recognition.
This is perhaps not surprising since it is often our most selfless and honest creative pursuits that garner honors and accolades. My landscape photography is born from a childlike joy and a pure, unwavering desire to share nature’s beauty with others.
I capture the majority of my landscape images at dawn or dusk, and all of the photographs in this collection were taken in Northeast Ohio. I am a firm believer in encouraging people to seek and recognize the beauty that exists around them. Our area may not offer the same type of grandeur as the Scottish Highlands or the Mediterranean Sea, but there is indeed abundant loveliness to be discovered here if you open to your eyes to it. Familiarity often creates a type of blindness, but I aim to create images that awaken viewers to look for beauty not only in big, vibrant sunsets, but also in the little things they see around them each day—the glistening dew on a roadside cobweb, the dappled shadows on a weathered barn, the crimson leaf floating in a mud puddle.
I shoot with a Canon 5D Mark III and process my images with Photoshop 5. Many of my images are meant to look almost like paintings. I do push the limit sometimes with intensity and vibrancy, but this is how I see the world. This is our area through my eyes, on high volume, as I experience it, with tremendous wonder, adoration and sensitivity.