1414 PATRICIA STREET KEY WEST FL 33040
P: (305) 294-3976
ROSANNE POTTER Key West Artist
Here, riding my Freedom Bike, I am on the White Street Pier in Key West, Florida, where I take most of my sunrise and sunset images. Older now, but still love this photo best.
Currently I am represented by Saphira & Ventura Gallery in Manhattan (4 West 43rd Street) and have shown work through Saphira in Sao Paulo, and Paris during 2017. A mini-solo of my work was shown at Saphira & Ventura in Manhattan, July 11/21, 2019.
I am an award-winning professional painter of abstract expressionist paintings.
To see my most recent work, please look at my Facebook page Rosanne.Potter.Works or my Instagram page .
PREVIOUSLY:
I was represented by Agora Gallery in the Chelsea District of New York (530 W. 25th Street) during 2012/2013. To see an online description of my work and images of paintings, go to the art magazine ARTisSpectrum Vol 28 (Nov. 2012), 58. For an interview and photo, Art-Mine link.
My abstract expressionism paintings, Many Levels, won (sixth place in Category 26) in the American Art Awards in October 2015. I was also an Accepted Artist for 2015 at Linus Gallery. My two latest awards are from Light Space & Time Art Gallery, a Special Merit award for Abstracts in 2015, and a Special Merit Award in an All Women competition in 2016.
Rosanne Potter paints in the Abstract Expressionist tradition, but her paintings vary greatly in style and palette. Never attempting a predictable style or look, each painting arises from the meeting of material, usually just paint (but sometimes sand, wax, or other collage materials) and canvas. The colors are chosen, but the structure of each work develops on its own. Some characteristic moves can be noted: looping circular strokes, metallic surface flares, horizontal color fields displayed and interplayed. Though they reappear, these features are not present in all works or even all present in any one work. Each of her major paintings develops intrinsically without reference to anything done earlier. She has no interest in repetitively creating work that can be identified as hers from across the room.
Potter allows herself to be surprised by her work, for although she does not start with the intention to depict a body, a face, or any other object, readable images seem to emerge from the paint in ways that are mysterious to her. Sometimes the shapes that emerge have mythical significance: skulls, mirrors, birds, animals, buildings, planetary systems. These are not images she has in mind and brings to the canvas; they are paint that forms itself into shapes that she can "read" and afterwards elaborate consciously if she chooses. Sometimes she incorporates her readings into a title; usually she leaves titles open, so that viewers can find what they wish to read in the imagery of the painting.
Potter began drawing informally as a young woman, by copying Picasso's Woman Ironing. She took a studio art class with American Abstractionist Clarence Giese during her Institute of European Studies Junior Year Abroad in Vienna. After a University career teaching English and Women's Studies, she took early retirement in Key West and turned back to painting. She took a weekly workshop with Joachim Loeber, known then as "the last living German Expressionist" who had also retired to Key West. Loeber taught technique rather than style: how different colors, paints, surface, and tools effect each other. After five years with Loeber, Potter published: Key West, Transit of Venus, Poems and Paintings by Rosanne Potter (SeaStory Press, 2005).
The work Potter presents here is non-representational, focused on shapes, colors, and types of gestures; its patterns "mean" only themselves, although she is aware that the viewer may see in them potential representations according to his or her interpretive bent. The work she calls Many Levels mixes rectilinear and curvilinear structures which are built up by layers of paint and follow lines laid down by an undercoat of gesso. Most recently she has worked with metallic paints, especially gold. The rotary motions described by the gold "flares" in Many Levels are countered, perhaps "balanced," by the vertical scrapes of the palette knife, and the "flares" themselves cross the wider vertical sweeps, some of which can be read as suggesting a seated figure that may be priestly or royal. That figure may be seen as "emergent" rather than "intended." Thus Many Levels refers not to the painting's readable imagery but to the fact that it was built up by many layers of paint.
