In Renee Robbins’ studio, nature magazines and biology books are everywhere. Images have been printed or torn out and taped to the walls. A significant part of her process is looking at these images...and looking and looking and looking…. However, by the time she’s painting her wild nature-scapes, she’s not working from any of these images. In fact, her process begins with abstract gestures within which the artist finds formal hints that she then works into various flora and fauna, both real and fictive. Artists tend to fall into certain categories in terms of making and using processes: intuitive or carefully planned, realistic or invented. Robbins’ practice is regularly and actively all of these, and it’s this complex tension between the familiar and the painterly that makes her compositions so visually and conceptually captivating.