Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Rebecca Spitzmiller graduated in Art at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida. She taught art in Florida, and has exhibited her works in acrylic, oil, watercolor and mixed media in the United States and Italy. 

 She now lives and works in Rome.

Presences and Echoes of Femininity

In Rebecca Spitzmiller’s images, still life becomes animated.  The artist’s agile hand creates harmonious and studied compositions, overcoming the static limits of “still life.” They evoke echoes of certain presences entwined in chromatism and forms: symbols of music, crocheted into the tales of myths and legends; sirens and enchantresses, animating the collective imagination and recalling ancient stories, screaming the desire to reveal themselves.

Voices of Woman: the force of femininity only apparently “still;” the metamorphosis of a striking vibrancy insinuating supremacy, but with discretion.  The surfaces of reality cannot contain it in its evolving complexity.  Nor does this reality seem able to represent the vibrancy in its entirety.   So the Voice penetrates the clumps of humus, renewing them, and the ancient and sensual forms of the violin-woman superimpose themselves in the still life.  And even if the musical instruments seem mute, abandoned by a reluctant and retracting hand, they announce the presence of the author, who employs this dominating violin element, thereby affirming the overt desire to compose an “Other” reality, where “natura morta” has a voice.  Naturally, a woman’s voice.

Spitzmiller recaptures icons from the collective memory, using them as a conceptual map into which she imbues her restless and glorious Woman’s voice, repudiating the formal composition, even while she uses it, to recreate life.

By Stefania Caracci