At the start of a new year, the walls of Hewitt’s bistro featured the art of Hewitt’s Visual Arts faculty. Included were three new canvasses of vibrant landscapes and whimsical natural scenes painted by our very own Mr. Stephen Rose. Mr. Rose has been at Hewitt for 13 years as a visual art teacher as well as an art history teacher for classes such as New York Art World and Studies in Contemporary Art. However, we rarely get to see this visual art teacher as a working artist.
As an artist, Rose prefers oil on canvas as his medium and enjoys capturing landscapes near his home in the Hudson River Valley. “I can be in nature and make art at the same time, which are two of my favorite things,” he commented.
“The Lizard’s View” is one of Mr. Rose’s favorites of his recent works; painting it helped him evolve his usage of color and brushstroke. “I feel I painted [`The Lizard’s View’] a lot more loosely, and I was happy I was able to get a more flowing brushstroke, which becomes a unifying part of the painting,” he remarked. The painting is full of blues, greens, and grays and captures the view from Breakneck Ridge in the Hudson River Valley. “I just wanted that big view; I like to bring the whole history of art into my paintings, and certainly van Gogh’s style is in `The Lizard Painting’ with that brushstroke.”
When looking at this painting, it’s as if we, too, are sharing the view of the lizard thanks to Mr. Rose’s usage of depth that skillfully brings us viewers to the edge of the mountain looking outward. Rose stated, “I like to create depth in a painting as opposed to modern art; I like to create depth so it’s ambiguous in some ways. I am trying to get more fluidity in my work because I really admire expressionist painters who can work so loosely and not lose control. To me, that’s the most admirable type of painting: it’s both spontaneous and conscious.” This spontaneity and consciousness is seen so strongly in Rose’s latest works that it’s as if he used these words as a foundation to his paintings. Although these two words may seem to contradict each other, the restrained and unrestrained brushwork merge as one in his paintings.
Additionally, Rose commented on differences he noticed in his three new paintings, particularly in “The Abduction of Europa” which depicted a sunset in Cape Cod on the Fourth of July. Rose says “The sunset one [`The Abduction of Europa’] is also different from my other paintings because it has more intense colors than I’m used to using. ” While at the beach on July 4th, Rose was “astounded by the color” and fascinated by the great numbers of different people. “I’m interested in making a series perhaps,” added Rose. “This tableau of people of all ages and all shapes”. Of the many spectators at the beach, the artist focused on a young girl who, while walking the edge of the seashore, gazed far off into the distance.
“The sunset painting is about leaving the familiar, that sense of being on the edge of something infinite when you’re at the seashore; you’re on dry land but your at the point where you think space goes on forever,” commented Rose. The painting embodies a combination between the naturalness of the young girl and the flatness of the canvas. The title of the painting – “The Abduction of Europa” – alludes to an ancient Greek myth of “Zeus taking a woman into the ocean with him. In order for her to go, she must leave all of everything she knows which refers to that idea of leaving the familiar for an infinite”.
Rose’s last painting in the Hewitt show is untitled and portrays a whimsical marsh accompanied by small birds which were added after being inspired by bird sanctuary. “The marsh painting is very fanciful; I thought the landscape was a little boring so I added two birds which made it somewhat fairytale – like.”
I asked the artist if he admires or finds inspiration in any artists. Rose replied, “Anselm Kiefer is my favorite artist by far, and he uses landscape totally as a metaphor. He doesn’t paint a landscape from what he sees but from what he thinks. I love how expressionist his works are, and how metaphorical.” He also admires artists such as Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet: “I admire the late Monet a lot as well. The late water lily paintings are an inspiration. To me, the other impressionists never really went as far as Monet: I look at those late paintings as mental landscapes.”
So will Rose continue to create metaphorical landscapes, or shall we expect something new? Rose said, “Right now I’m doing very short paintings while the colors change, just capturing the changing of color in a day. Since I moved up to the Hudson Valley, the landscape has been very dominant; I think I might do more figurative works and put more of a stress on the figures.”
“The spontaneous and conscious” aspects that Mr. Rose admires in artwork has resonated strongly in his own works, utilizing ideas from the old masters and combining it with his own personal style.