Rose attended Ringling College of Art and Design and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree at the University of South Florida. She holds a Fine Arts Master’s degree from the University of Southampton’s Winchester School of Art in the United Kingdom. Rose grew up on the Gulf Coast of Florida on St. Petersburg Beach surrounded by water, humidity, and sunshine. She then lived in England and New Jersey and New York City, before moving to Bulgaria for seven years. While there she traveled, painted, and exhibited her artwork. Rose’s paintings have been shown at the Salvador Dali Museum, Newark Arts Festival Open Doors, and other exhibitions.   

 In addition to being an international artist, Rose has always been involved in her art community. She believes in cultivating imagination and creativity across all ages saying, “Mess making can be a technique if we do it with intention.” Throughout her career she has designed and taught visual arts programs for teens at Youth Arts Corps in Florida, adults at The Newark Museum in New Jersey, children at Muziko: the first and only Children’s Museum in Eastern Europe. She also facilitated at international professional development retreats with Samodiva Leader Academy in the Bulgarian mountains. In October of 2019, Rose returned to her hometown and Banyan-tree-style roots of St. Petersburg, Florida. The shifts in climate, physical landscapes and cultures have shaped her emotional and creative archetypes and topography, creating her artworks she considers “Inner Landscapes”.

Artist Statement

I have always considered my work portraits of my inner landscape. These landscapes reflect moments where I acknowledge my place in time, when I can catch a glimpse of understanding, and I have a momentary synthesis in the process. The subjects of my work are fragments of time, ink stains from transitions, and hints of form with thread-like lines ribboning around ‘the space between’. The images bleed, shift, a space opens, formulates, and a sense remains.

My paintings are made with inks, acrylics, and water-soluble mixed media. I work on cotton rag paper, primed canvases, loose muslin, and occasionally wood surfaces. My selection of materials is both based on texture and an emotional resonance at the time of the initial mark. This choice is conceptually quite literal in that my pigments rest on the surface of primed canvas almost as a resist; they seep and expand into a cotton rag paper or muslin as an absorption, and hold, carve, and trace wood in such a way that “goes with the grain.” The images in my work fluctuate between abstraction and the figurative, depending on what or who emerges and if I’m able to see and draw that out of the pigments. It is a process I equate to scrying, cloud watching, or Pareidolia with a dash of intent. This intent draws from archetypal figures, totem animals, imagined flora and fauna from my abstracted inner landscapes, and horizon lines from the physical landscapes I have moved through. 

My works are a documentation of the culminating process of time through a mark, a movement, and magic. Emily Dickinson described the creative ‘space’ as, “to wonder what myself might say.” For me it is when I can hear the whisper of what my ‘self’ or the place is saying but cannot repeat it aloud, because like a fresh dream, it will dilute and slip away.