False Boundary II

Chairman of the Painting/Printmaking department at Kansas City Art Institute, Rosser moved to the United States from South Wales in 1972. Although trained as a painter, he has spent many of his productive years as an artist constructing sculptures and assemblages. However, in 1998 he returned to painting due to an unfortunate mishap in his studio. During a thunderstorm he was trying to make some repairs in his studio and fell from a stepladder. Rosser received a severe concussion and broke his wrist. These injuries put an end to his sculptures and assemblages since he could no longer use his power tools to create these works. In the fall of 1998 he took a year long sabbatical and began focusing on painting once again. During the past couple of years he has produced more than forty paintings. These new paintings are fresh and not overworked, but visually pleasing. He used palette knives, stencils, squeegees and masking tape in lieu of paintbrushes. In False Boundary, Rosser uses an elliptical motif in a repeating fashion that creates a sense of rhythm. The recurring elliptical shapes characterize this series of paintings. However, other paintings just previous to this work have ?tails? on the ellipses. In this painting the ?tails? are gone, but there are now block forms opposite the ellipses. A real sense of movement exists where the artist has dragged the paint quickly across the surface. The colors of the ellipses turn from a black at the top to white at the bottom of the row. An energetic change seems to be at play in this new body of work by Rosser.