Ros Bush
Rosalind Bush’s art making begins from a variety of art books. She reappropriates well-established iconography across the fine art and pop culture landscape. Rosalind is primarily concerned with studying the figure, often referencing the works of the Great Masters or photo portraits from National Geographic. Rosalind typically defines areas of her subject with dark outlines, bringing attention to the foreground.
Transcription of Audio Interview with Director of Exhibitions at Visionaries and Voices, Skip Cullen speaking on the work of Ros Bush:
"I guess Ros, as a person and as an artist, is very headstrong. She's very stubborn but also very sort of binary, sort of opinionated. She either really loves something or hates something. And hate's a strong word, but like if you ask Ros, "Hey, what do you think of this?" she would be like, "Yeah!" or a very strong "No". And I think that translates through her work in the fact that she uses pretty saturated color and that hard black line that she uses around her work. Most of her work is pretty figurative. She draws inspiration from everywhere, be it a magazine or be it family member portraits, and sometimes it would be plants. And she jumps around a lot in her practice, and the good thing about that, I guess, would be that she has a sort of sensibility to her line making and to her bold color choices that you can tell are Ros' piece from any other piece. Like it differentiates itself in the way that the marks are made and thy're just sort of done in a straightforward way. And I think that's what a lot of people miss about Ros' work when they first see it is that it's just very literal and straightforward that you go, "oh, ok," but, then when you start to look at the marks, that were made that, in my opinion, no one else can make, there's a uniqueness to it like "oh there's something there that I didn't see that I was missing before." I don't think she understands sometimes even the people that tell her how unique her mark making is cause she's just very humble and sort of shy about it like "oh, I just put this figure, I just painted this figure cause I liked it." And um I think over time she's learned to sort of trust that, that there is like this innate value in the marks that she makes and that no one else can do—the sort of uniqueness to it."
Transcription of image description for Rosalind Bush:
This is a painting called “Piano” by Rosalind Bush, created using acrylic on canvas and panel. The dimensions are large: four feet wide and three feet tall. The image is of a piano keyboard and music notes depicted on a vibrant red background, and the overall color palette includes shades of red, black, white, and hints of gray. The piano is painted on a smaller canvas which is approximately 12 inches wide, nestled inside a much larger four-foot-wide panel that serves as a frame. Both the canvas and the panel frame are painted bright red, so the small piano image at the center stands out quite starkly against the red. The brush strokes of this painting are thick, bold, and confident, and the textures the paint created on the canvas are visible. The large red wooden panel framing the image is full of texture - there are scratches and other divots in the surface. The red color of the panel is continuous, but some parts of the frame are shaded slightly lighter or darker variations of red. On the small canvas at the center, the piano is painted as a rectangular electric keyboard rather than an acoustic piano. It has two gray legs to hold it up coming from the bottom of the keyboard. It is set at a slight angle, so the perspective of the viewer is from above and slightly to the left of the keyboard. There are approximately 50 keys on the piano keyboard, and the keys are white with gray borders, alternating with shorter and smaller black keys. The body of the keyboard is black with a gray strip running along the top of the keys. Floating to the left and above/behind the piano are black music notes. These are also painted in perspective, as if some of the notes are close to the viewer while others are further away and fading into the distance, giving the impression that musical sound is floating in the air around the piano. On the bottom right corner of this small canvas are the initials of the artist, painted in black: “RB”. The overall effect of this painting is bold and passionate.