Believing, knowing.

Behind-the-Scenes for Blithe Spirit

Raquel Marie Tripp

Raquel Marie Tripp is an African-American artist creating narrative representational works of figuration from her northern California studio. Tripp is a Cota-Robles Fellowship recipient, and uses her studio practice to address contemporary concerns around the veracity of the image and the performance of identity. At San Jose State University she earned a B.A. in Studio Arts, a Teaching credential for art, and is anticipating receiving an M.F.A. in Studio Arts from the University of California, Davis.

“I use figurative works to explore the boundary between perception and recognition. Inside the small space between stimuli and response is a fragile coexistance with the unknown. I work to prolong that space of confusion, fear, and acceptance, by layering together unrelated and tanslucent imagery. The dark and at times hidden figures that I create call to mind the impulse to protect or hide culture, identity, and the corporeal body from threat. In my drawings and paintings I use naturalistic imagery of people and places to construct realistically believable, but explicitly not real, allegories about the perception of feminine bodies.”

Past Works

Irreconsilable Diffeerences
2025, Pennyroyal, mugwart, cotton, root, bark, 36”x48”

Untitled
2024. Charcoal, paper.

Behind The Scenes:
Believing, knowing.

Behind-the-Scenes for Blithe Spirit

“One of the figures in this work is not drawn”, Raquel said. “Who?” I asked.

The figure’s form is held within absence. Dust from charcoal, clay, and paper pulp drifts from other areas of the drawing and settles across the surface, where Raquel carefully brushes it away, wipes it back. The figure is excavated, and a ghost, a trace, made visible through removal.

Thereby, the question shifts from what am I looking at to who was here. The fallen at the bottom of the drawing, including powdered pastel pigment, broken vine charcoal, scraps of spice scented sanded paper, becomes just as important as what’s left on the surface. Raquel keeps them, resisting the impulse to clean the drawing into an effortless final form.

She wants her works to be laid bare. Not framed by borders, not fixed to the wall, so they can be fully viewed.

“I think about unrecorded history,” she told me, “the narratives of the marginalized lives that don’t make it into the canon—but are still a part of the story..”

This philosophy runs through her process, In the way she layers charcoal, cinnamon, calabash clay, and earth from her father’s grave; in the way she works under shifting light, blinding herself with a rear spotlight to blur drawn and imagined; and in the way her drawings obscure clarity, resist passive viewing, and invite audiences to linger with her in uncertainty.

Her drawing asks the viewers to wait before deciding, thus noticing how belief works, how quickly it forms, how comfortably it settles, and how that comfort can be dangerous in a world where people are so often misread, disbelieved, or erased from the narrative altogether.

To believe is easy, but to know requires time, vulnerability, and a willingness to be changed. Through what eludes closure in her works, Raquel asks: Are you prepared to leave certainty behind?