By Richard L. Gaw
Staff Writer

I feel like gold
Electric love is running from my
Head to my toes
Addicted to this feeling, and I
Won’t let it go

From “Gold” by Myles Smith

The rain on the last day of July poured outside the Landenberg home where Rachel Broadbent lives with her husband Eric and their two children to the degree that it resembled silver tinsel.

It became both an unrelenting statement and the perfect canopy for the conversation that took place there.

One does not enter Broadbent’s art with the smallest of curious steps. Rather, from the time he or she first encounters the work is the first moment of pure surrender into the awesome spectacle of landscape. The large canvases are meant to swallow one in a ferocity of weather against the smallness of a single human being. Outerbanks Sunrise. Breathless. Acadia Mist. Through the Clouds. Gathering Fury.

A few years ago, she and her son took a walk and saw the beginning of a storm forming above their neighbor’s house. While her husband was frantically calling her to demand that she get home, Broadbent immediately started taking photographs of the violent swirl of an azure sky bursting in the distance. When she returned home, she pulled out her pastels and, working on a 22” by 26” sanded drawing paper, created what would become Silence Before the Reckoning.

The violent storm that followed Broadbent and her son back to their home was not an isolated experience. Like an omnipresent albatross, weather has followed Broadbent and spun her creativity into a kaleidoscope of fury, colors and emotion. In 1994, when she was in the fourth grade, she experienced a tornado sweep through the Landenberg neighborhood where she was raised. The storm destroyed their neighbor’s home, then another home and also destroyed the home Broadbent was raised in. The family’s neighbors saved her mother Beth Huber’s life.

“As a kid you don’t realize how big and impactful an event like this really is, but it first began when I was in the fourth grade and lived through the experience,” Broadbent said. “As an adult, I am particularly drawn to the energy of a storm building up. We can feel that energy, but that energy is massive, and I suppose my artistic message in these paintings is that we are at Mother Nature’s disposal.

“This is my homage to her,” she said. “My artwork is my call to others to protect her.

‘The places where I felt myself’

The application of pastels to a canvas – in the same manner as words are written on a notepad or fiber is woven on a spinner’s wheel – is a virtually homeless practice and can be achieved anywhere, but for the maker, however, the influence of place is often as strong as a parent’s guiding hand. For Broadbent, who earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and has frequently exhibited her work at galleries and shows throughout Chester County and beyond, Landenberg has always been her artistic anchor. She was born and raised in the home where her mother still lives, and her children explore the same thicket of woods that she did when she was their age.

“After my freshman year in college, I transferred from Penn State to Temple because my dad, my grandfather and my uncle were all in the hospital at the same time, and I felt the urge to be closer to home for them,” she said. “After I transferred, my art became more nature-based landscapes, because that was what made me feel safe, but in art school, teachers want their students’ cognitive thoughts transferred to art, but it didn’t feel authentic to me.

“What felt authentic to me was the trees and the clouds and our neighbors’ houses in Landenberg - the places where I felt myself and where I was raised.”

After graduating from the Tyler School of Art in 2008, Broadbent taught art in North Carolina for seven years and for two additional years at Avon Grove Charter School. Soon after giving birth to her daughter, she left teaching in 2017. 

“I realized that I couldn’t teach anymore,” she said. “In my capacity as a human being, I have a lot of love to give. However, I can’t do that all day at school for my students and do the same for my children at night.”

The second tornado of Broadbent’s life swept through her life the following year. Her father John Huber, a long-time, self-employed carpenter, died on December 4, 2018. She was 34 years old.

“When you lose someone who is very important you, you are forced to make changes,” she said. “I used to believe that I would have more time with him, but when he died, it hit me that this was my life and that if there were things that I needed to do, I needed to do them now.

“As an adult, you realize where your strengths and weaknesses are, and one of my weaknesses has been processing my emotions. When I began to do the necessary work to deal with my father’s loss and become a better parent for my children, I realized that my outlet for these emotions was through art.”

With encouragement from her husband, Broadbent flung herself into her creative work, one that expanded her work as a pastel artist, signaled the start of her oil paintings, and introduced a new medium – hand-carved charcuterie boards - that was inspired by the memory of seeing her father’s life as a carpenter and the sight of his sweat-embossed hands and the sweet-smelling sawdust that covered them as he worked.

“My art is a way to honor his memory, because his loss was just so huge to me,” Broadbent said. “A lot of artists are very empathetic, and sometimes those feelings feel so big and dangerous, especially when they are out of the artist’s control. It feels safer to dig into the art than talk about mourning. Too often, I can express my emotions – my grieving - on a canvas but I can’t express it in words when the emotions are too strong.”

‘I become an observer of myself’

The weather has begun to firmly announce its presence high above the Broadbent garden, and the thunder is a firm indicator that the children’s request to play outside would quickly be denied.

As she prepares for an upcoming fine art and craft fair – she does about ten a year and will be one of the nine host homes at the Artists of Landenberg Studio Tour on October 11 and 12 – Broadbent draws peace and focus from the ritual of her mornings. After her children leave for school and her husband Eric goes off to teach at Avon Grove High School – she does mobility exercise, meditates and focuses on something for which she is grateful. Eventually, she climbs the steps that lead to her loft studio space above the home’s living room. There, she consults her playlist – independent, folk, pop - Myles Smith is a current favorite - and slowly, she begins to forget the paint brushes and the pastels in her hands and disappears into a state of flow consciousness. Many days – not all of them – she will work from 9 a.m. until 2 p.m., an uninterrupted time block of five hours.

“When I am working on a painting or playing the piano, it is almost like I am an observer instead the maker of those things,” she said. “I become an observer of myself. My music playlist doesn’t necessarily go together but the stipulation is that they have to all feel good. Often, I will sing when I work, and if I am working on a piece for an upcoming show, my neighbors will inform me that I have been serenading them all day.” 

As the conversation began to conclude, a distant thunder crack was heard, and its reverberation coincided with the moment when Rachel Broadbent - mother, wife, artist, teacher - was asked to go beyond the controlled fury of her weather canvases and get to the smallish hollow that is held within a place the creatives often go but cannot describe – the part of the self that is burrowed in a cocoon of their own making but knows there must be a purpose for what they do.

Why expend the consistent effort in solitude? Consider the paintbrushes and the canvases and the doodles and the glossy dollops of paint. What are you using these instruments for and what are you trying to convey? 

“You can take the teacher out of the classroom, but you can’t take the classroom out of the teacher, and I suppose that is what my purpose as an artist is – to get people to believe in their own gifts,” Broadbent said. “I really want them to look at my art and have them feel, ‘If she is doing this, I can do something that connects me with my soul.’ 

“Whatever that thing is that lights that person up, that’s what they should be doing, because that is where they have the most capacity to make the most difference. For me, my skills lie in what I love to do, and I hope that love is what comes across in my paintings.” 

To learn more about Rachel Broadbent, visit www.rachel-broadbent.com.

To contact Staff Writer Richard L. Gaw, email [email protected].