INTERVIEW BY MEG HITCHCOCK

March 25, 2023

IN THEIR STUDIOS: Alyse Rosner

Alyse Rosner’s mural size paintings are a magnificent maelstrom of brushstrokes, drips, and vibrant color. In her current show at Rick Wester Fine Art, Rosner takes us on a journey that begins with harmonious surface gestures, growing increasingly chaotic as we move into the depths of the composition. Washes of saturated color surge across the unprimed canvas, cascading into the foreground in an effusion of polymer and pigment.

See more here

REVIEW BY RIAD MIAH IN TWO COATS OF PAINT

March 21, 2023

Gale force: Alyse Rosner at Rick Wester

“Bracing Against the Wind,” the title of Alyse Rosner’s solo exhibition at Rick Wester Fine Art, can be read literally and poetically. While her paintings depict dynamic elements of nature, they also reveal the intuitive hand of the artist.

See more here

REVIEW BY JOHN YAU IN HYPERALLERGIC

June 26, 2021

Painting Abstractly in the Midst of Unending Crises

Alyse Rosner is grappling with the question of how to make an abstract painting reflect both the personal and collective.

See more here

photo by Tom Powel Imaging, courtesy of Rick Wester Fine Art

ARTIST SPOTLIGHT : USPS Art Project

See more here

What was your studio situation like during quarantine?

I have been very lucky during quarantine. My studio is a walk- out basement in my home, so I have had access to it throughout the pandemic. Last winter I applied for a residency through the Clementina Arts Foundation and I was notified in March of 2020 that I was awarded a studio for 6 months in unused retail space in the Stamford Town Center mall… Currently I have four mural scale paintings underway, a layered installation of frottage scrolls on yupo and sheer fabric panels that is part of my collaborative project Object, Surface, Texture, and a handful of other odds and ends.

Have the influences for your work changed throughout this year?

I don’t think the influences have changed, but I have pursued my impulses more freely than I do in “normal times”. I usually make large scale abstract paintings combining graphite rubbings from nature and my home, gestural brushwork, obsessive mark making and transparent color. The paintings are materials driven but also reflect my personal experience and environmental concerns. Once the reality of the pandemic and lockdown sunk in, suddenly I felt like “anything goes”. It was a weird time. It still is. So I pursued ideas that in the past I might have ignored because they didn’t fit with my work, exactly…

Image courtesy of Heide Follin

ART SPIEL Artists on Coping: Alyse Rosner

See more here

During the coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping. …
AS: Has your routine changed?

AR: I probably am a routine kind of person (because we all probably are?) but in my mind, I shun routine; I dread that kind of monotony. Right now my days feel very long. But I am fortunate that so far everyone in my circle is healthy and my studio is here in my basement. Still, it’s been very hard to focus-- I am distracted and worried. I do have lots of work in process in the studio though and I am drawing and painting as much as I can. Under normal circumstances, my primary focus is large scale paintings, but lately I am concentrating on small surfaces: ink on paper and acrylic on wood… I have a few big paintings going but I’m not forcing them. I’m also painting on some small cedar cubes that I’ve had in my studio for about 10 years. I don't have any specific deadlines right now and that has taken the pressure off and opened my process to some extent. My work doesn't always come together in a logical sequence and I try to be patient. Varying my practice and materials has generated some new vocabulary and right now I’m definitely in transition- curious to see where that takes me. 

ARC FINE ART Regeneration May 2019

Essay by Jacquelyn Gleisner

See more here

In the back corner of Alyse Rosner’s studio, a pile of sycamore leaves rest on top of a gray flat file. The raised veins inside each arm of these massive leaves—the biggest of any native tree in North America—connect at one central point at their base. Stacked and dried as a group inside Rosner’s studio, these remnants of her process have curled upward forming an olive and brown saucer with many papery layers. Rosner scavenges her front yard in Westport, Connecticut for these leaves—most plentiful in late summer and early autumn. When her collection has been amassed and new paintings are waiting to be started, Rosner spends a full day, sometimes longer, making graphite rubbings onto raw canvas. She also carefully transfers other naturally occurring surfaces such as the top of roughly-hewn stump only steps from the back door to her studio. From these textures, Rosner builds her luminous paintings, working in a steady, additive process. 

NEWCOMB ART MUSEUM OF TULANE

Unfamiliar Again: Contemporary Women Abstractionists

Curated by Monica Ramirez-Montagut

August 24 – December 23, 2017

The artists in this exhibition explore new ways of abstraction based on experimental, process-oriented methods. Intended to defamiliarize common imagery, their practices preclude figurative recognition or easy comprehension. Their methods are nuanced, time-intensive, and often drawn from unlikely sources…

Works by Rachel Beach, Morgan Blair, Amy Ellingson, Brittany Nelson, Alyse Rosner, Barbara Takenanga, Anne Vieux.

WoArt Conversation with Christina Massey

WoArt is a blog by artist and curator, Christina Massey…
"Interviews of the female artists that inspire & excite my own creative practice and are active participants breaking the rules, trends and challenging the “norm” of the male dominated Art World."

See more here

365 Artists 365 Days

On January 1, 2014, Frank Juarez Gallery and Greymatter Gallery launched the 365 Artists 365 Days Project to the world. What started as a way to spotlight contemporary artists daily from across the country blossomed into getting the attention of artists from across the globe such as Germany, Slovenia, Australia, Russia, London, Israel and the United Kingdom.

See more here

ART NEW ENGLAND review by Patricia Rosoff

Alyse Rosner: Large Scale Work

Curated by Harry Philbrick
artSPACE · New Haven, CT

November 2012 - January 2013

view pdf here

Alyse Rosner’s unique color works are hand-drawn and painted in media that include paint, so that one might be tempted to call them paintings—except (and this is a big exception) they are brimming with a printmaker’s doting affection for line. Line is writ large in these mostly massive images hung simply, by magnets. All of these works are engaged in the spirit of line. Each one is a bustling ode to squiggle and edge, demonstrating a wriggling, restless, get-on-with-it urgency; raising a toast to crispness and calligraphic momentum; sounding a clink to delicate slicing and dicing; and a hurrah to bumpy welts and snaky passages.

These are joyous love songs to the matter of paper, too, drawn on an archival “green” material called Yupo (made of polypropylene). It is not paper at all but a material that mimics the creamy translucence of parchment and offers what appears to be a skittery surface for pigment to slide across. Marks skate upon such a stage, skidding across surface in clean trajectories that vary only in their relative momentum.

There is no way to describe these works without accounting for the dynamics of them. Gravity and magnetic attraction play out in shallow layers upon the narrow vertical plane of the picture field. Narrow, blade-like intrusions, striped with white puff-paint that pools in a dollop that marks the start and stop of each margin, reach in from one edge of the paper to the center; crisp dark strands (like fistfuls of electric wire) attach them, like hammock strings, to the other. Linear things pile up from page bottom; yarn-like things hang down. Fat flat rivers of pattern snake up the page; ribbon-like bindings tie the loops together.

These are pictures constructed like stacked architectural drawings, one layer upon the next, each distinguished by the various pigment “delivery systems” employed. Razor-sharp technical pen lines, each laid in like the end grain of a deck of playing cards, define one kind of passage. The wide trails of a square brush, traversing in sinuous echelon, establish another. Like contrapuntal voices in an organic sort of boogie-woogie, Rosner’s work is a grinning nod to a wild and woolly world of traffic.
—Patricia Rosoff

THE ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

Full Circle November - June 2009 Curated by Regine Basha

Works by Kelly Bigelow Becerra, Jaclyn Conley, Paul Favello, Robert Federico, Beth Gilfilen, Jim Hett, Bryan Jones, Nathan Lewis, Christopher Mir, Mari Ogihara, Alyse Rosner, Joseph Smolinski, Thuan Vu, and Benjamin Weiner

Full Circle pdf

Alyse Rosner’s work in abstract painting and drawing has long had an aesthetic affinity with such practices as Indian miniature painting and illuminated manuscript. The use of pointillist marks and minute line in her work borders on the ritualistic, and through their continual repetition in hundreds of works, a unique lexicon of marks forms. As with the earlier work, the larger, looser paintings that form the new series are generative, in that each informs the making of the next. Marks taken from nature (tree rubbings on Japanese Yupo paper, liquefied brushstrokes) take on organic properties that teeter between the measured and the spontaneous gesture. The works reflect ongoing investigations with texture, color, light, and density, and the possibility of new material processes.

WESTPORT ART CENTER Alyse Rosner: New Paintings June 2006

Essay by Harry Philbrick

see pdf here

On one level, describing the paintings in an Alyse Rosner exhibition is quite simple; all the works are 5 1/2 x 6 inches. Rosner consistently paints on wooden panels cut from standard one-inch thick boards. Given their small scale, the works seem almost chunky; they are thick in proportion to their size. This gives them a sculptural feel – the viewer is aware of them as objects, not just paintings.

Aware of these sculptural underpinnings, Rosner places the wood so that the grain runs vertically. Before she has made a mark she has made a number of decisions limiting and influencing the paintings she will create. While one might think that she has a consistent arena within which to work, each piece of wood has its own characteristics of grain, knot holes, and texture of surface to respond to.

The artist has said that the small scale and consistent use of a humble support – the board – “originally evolved out of the limitations of my life – space and time constraints – but became crucial to the imagery. The scale of the work allows me to get very involved and develop the detail and tiny mark making.”

Rosner has found freedom through limitation. This connects her work in spirit and process to Eastern art, and in fact Rosner cites Indian miniatures, manuscript illuminations, and Japanese screen paintings as influences. All have formal and procedural constraints within which artists have traditionally worked. Interestingly, the one contemporary artist she cites as an influence is Chuck Close, who has built a major and staggeringly inventive body of work by working within self-imposed limitations.

For Rosner, the limitations of scale and material are just the beginning. She limits herself to a small repertoire of mark making – dots, small dashes, slight curls, lacy swirls – atop veils of color. The mark making is direct, confident, precise, and clear. The viewer can easily see how the works were made, and the connection to another artist Rosner cites as an influence, Philip Guston. Like Guston, Rosner’s work has an almost cartoon-like simplicity.

Yet despite the sculptural quality of the support and the simplicity of approach to mark making, these are above all paintings. Again, the artist: “Painting is the most direct route to generate the language. The color and surface are just as important as the mark making. Initially, I considered the paintings on wood to be in place of drawings– in the sense that I was processing ideas to see how they would look. As the work develops from piece to piece I control the image more. The experience of printmaking — specifically etching and woodblock printing– also informs the physical process of how the paintings are made. But I choose paint for its directness. In printmaking there is distance between creating the image and the actual print… These are paintings. They are not a representation (picture) of something else. When they work, they become their own thing – and to me, they look like something is happening and I’ve caught it mid way. Stop action.”

Stop action is a good phrase for describing these paintings. The stopped action could be a rising tide, a passing sea of phosphorescence, the swish of a dress, or some more cosmic event.

But, as Rosner states, these are not pictures; the stopped action is painting. These works are intensely personal, even private paintings, created amidst the daily tumult of children and household. Painting under these conditions is indeed a heroic undertaking. Action painting was, in its day, viewed as a brave and iconoclastic achievement. Perhaps we might view Rosner’s smaller scale actions as even more of an accomplishment; to create such beauty within the exigencies of the household is to connect to some of the most vital traditions in both art and craft. This is a major achievement. This is art that reminds the viewer to look again at one’s own boundaries not as limitations, but as opportunities.

Harry Philbrick May, 2006

All quotes by the artist from email correspondence with the author, April, 2006.