Art

George Rose

Ponds, Oil on PaperFor thirty-five years George Rose has taught painting and drawing at the college-level. He received a BFA at Washington University , St. Louis, and MFA at University of Colorado, Boulder with additional schooling at the New York studio School, New York City, and the Yale Summer School, Norfolk. Rose began his teaching at Southwest Missouri State University (now Missouri State University), Springfield. His teaching positions continued on to Boston University; Northwest Missouri State University, Maryville; the New York Studio School; the Chautauqua Institute, New York.

Over the years Rose has exhibited in competitive, invitational, group and solo shows, primarily in college and university galleries throughout the Midwest and the Northeast United States. Several of his shows accompanied Visiting Artist appointments for lectures and critiques. Rose recalls that the richest and most positive experiences were not necessarily the most prestigious of locations.

Painting is magic. With adequate space, privacy, material means and an educated capacity to visualize through a special language, a painter can contrive an alternate world of rhythmic unity and proportional ebb and flow that breathes…as we do. An evocative order may summarize the phenomenal resonance of a landscape motif in a particular condition of light. Painting may set the mind wondering, provoke questions, and most importantly touch the heart. As such, painting can reflect learned sophistication and intuitively formed feeling at the same time. Such are the virtues I strive for with sporadic and limited success. All of this, and love of the painting media are why I paint. And beyond that, it is plain addictive…and therapeutic. In the end I consider myself a painter, not an artist. Time, endurance and others will have to determine that; I cannot.

Required of anyone who wants to be a painter is some innate talent, a well-grounded education with emphasis on drawing, a tenacious work ethic, a rage to create, and knowledge of and feeling for the beauty and living relevance of the painting tradition. My influences over nearly fifty years of production have been many, but with a few to which I always seem to return. Here I could drop names spread over the centuries, but prefer not to do so. My work in this show will reveal some of those influences, but I hope will also reveal a personal synthesis of influences and experience. I have always worked in series of variations on a thematic source, whether from direct observation or from memory and invention. Several of the works in the exhibit come from these open-ended series.

-George Rose

 

Last Updated: 9/1/09