Artist Bio
Rachel Owen is a photographer living and working with her husband and son in the Chicagoland area. Right out of high school Rachel began working as a wedding and portrait photographer and is currently evolving into her true passion, green-screen photography and digital compositing. As an Adobe Certified Photoshop Expert, she often merges photos of her subjects in the studio on greenscreen into miniature objects or even combines multiple photographs to create a new setting that does not exist in the real world.
Many describe Rachel as a “self-taught” artist, but she has an aversion towards this moniker and contributes her knowledge to the study of many master artists. Although she has no formal degree she jumps at every learning opportunity she can; online classes, private workshops, art blogs, museum lectures, and college textbooks are just a few of the ways she satisfies her ambition for education. Considering education her third-highest life priority she makes studying imperative daily practice. You can often find her wandering the Art Institute of Chicago with a favorite book in hand such as Symbols and Allegories in Art.
Rachel's primary goal when photographing anyone is to make the person in front of her lens feel empowered and to have that empowerment show up and provoke the viewer. Her images are often described as surreal and whimsical, and they take the viewer into a fantasy to blur the lines between reality and fiction. Rachel describes her desire to create as a fundamental energy in her soul that hurts more to keep in than to let out.