Rosemarie Armstrong
Enchante II
2013 — oil on canvas, 30 X 30" : $1800.00
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Romantic Ruin
2012 — oil on canvas, 24 X 48" : $2600.00
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Andantino II
2013 — oil on canvas, 30 X 30" : $1800.00
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What sets Rosemarie’s work apart from contemporary painters of landscape? Rosemarie transforms the average into the exquisite, the mundane into the spectacular. Planning is deliberate. Execution is intuitive. The experience is exhilarating. Rosemarie is driven to create; canvas and the painter’s tools are her vehicles of exploration. Subject matter which may appear insignificant, is translated into rich visual experiences, compelling vistas with a magical quality. How does Rosemarie achieve this impact? She believes that when executing her paintings, ‘perfection is the illusion of detail’. Rosemarie works primarily with oil and acrylic paints using a layering technique that knows no brush strokes in the initial phase of a painting. Acrylic paint is often used as a groundwork for the oil. The multiple layers of paint lead to a feeling of depth, this is not an illusion, it is a deliberate process. Her objective is to translate the movement, light and emotion of a landscape or subject onto the canvas quickly, building a compositional foundation for the painting. As the painting progresses, the use of increasingly smaller brushes and tools purposefully builds the details necessary to define selected properties and elements. A series of focal points varying in intensity can be discovered when studying Rosemarie’s work. Her technique is solid and her approach disciplined. Currently, Rosemarie is nurturing two themes in her work; both are close to her heart. For six years, she has been creating landscape paintings which define our past and present rural communities. This series, the “Jewels of Rural Ontario”, inspires her to find hidden treasures on our back roads, farms, wetlands and shores where she works plein-air, completes sketches and small paintings to be developed on larger canvases in her studio. Rosemarie will continue pursuing this bucolic theme in her artwork while concurrently developing a new series, “Legacy”. The Legacy series celebrates the ever changing face of the natural world. Solitary, angry, illuminated, peaceful; it ranges from complacent to vindictive. Rosemarie is drawn to rugged windswept coastlines, mountain gorges, old growth forests, an island in a crystal sea, the cloud forest of the Andes. Here in the absence of progress, virgin impact of the earth’s forces can be seen and felt, weather creates every color and hue of sky, the wind drives sea against land, pending storm juxtaposed with a tranquil landscape, creates a temporary illusion of calm..... Mankind’s quest for progress is in conflict with the preservation of our rural spaces, and our wild places. Rosemarie hopes her paintings will make an enduring statement to current and future generations: that our natural world deserves our reverence and respect. A prolific painter, Rosemarie’s paintings and commissioned works can be found in a great number of private collections in Ontario and abroad.