Wendy Tremayne

Wendy Tremayne is a painter, conceptual artist, and author based in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. In 1992 she chose to hold painting back until her fiftieth birthday, believing twenty-five years of longing would charge the work like a battery. She began painting in oil in November 2017, working primarily in portraiture and figurative painting with elements of magical realism, often placing herself as the subject in a process of self-inquiry and self-realization worked out on the canvas. Her influences include Ilya Zomb, George Tooker, Remedios Varo, and Bo Bartlett. Her paintings have shown in gallery exhibitions across New Mexico, including a solo show, The Inexhaustible Now, at Rio Bravo Fine Art Gallery, pairing her figurative and portrait work with prose written during the painting process itself.

Tremayne’s painting practice extends a decades-long career in conceptual art. Fiscally sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, she has produced public, media-driven works exploring empire, class, and the commodification of culture, including Swap-O-Rama-Rama, a community-based textile reuse model adopted in over 150 cities worldwide, and NO BUSH, a 2004 public performance in Central Park that drew responses from over 50 countries. Other works include the Vomitorium, Ketsup & Onions, A Hot Day in Texas, and Phoenix Rising, a post-9/11 community metalworking project.

Her conceptual practice also produced Holy Scrap, a decade-long commitment to making everything needed for sustainable living, from food and shelter to fuel and medicine, on a one-acre lot in Truth or Consequences. That project became the foundation for her book, The Good Life Lab: Radical Experiments in Hands-On Living (Storey Publishing, 2013), winner of the Nautilus Book Award for sustainability and lifestyle and named a best summer read by Publisher’s Weekly.