As an artist, Stephanie Rose makes abstract landscape paintings in order to touch, consider and communicate earth’s ephemeral and intangible phenomena. Working in oil, she distills her sensorial and emotional responses to experiences in wilderness and gardens, and on farms and ranches. Being curious about her orientation to the natural world, Rose explores landscapes from various vantage points. Rose’s expressive paintings are ethereal, inscrutable, familiar and mysterious.
Rose has exhibited at The Brinton Museum, The Wyoming State Capitol and Turner Fine Art. Her paintings have been featured in The Western Art Collector. Rose received the Bonner Family Award, The BoldBrush Award for Abstract, and the Northwest College Board of Trustees Purchase Award. Rose has been an artist in residence at The Brinton Museum, University of Utah’s Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities, Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area and Absaroka Beartooth Wilderness Foundation. Her art education includes courses at Oberlin College, Northwest College and study with professional artists. She holds a BA degree in East Asian Studies from Oberlin College, and a MS degree in Land Resources from the University of Wisconsin - Madison.
Her artwork furthers a life-long commitment to positive environmental change, informed by a career in sustainable agriculture.
Rose lives and works in Wyoming with her family. Her hand-built adobe home is powered by wind and sun and surrounded by a pollinator-friendly garden of native plants.
I am drawn to places shaped by aridity, wind, extreme temperatures, swiftly changing weather conditions and vast expanses of open sky and land - places where I feel vulnerable. What enthralls me are fleeting motes of moisture sent airborne when ground thaws; the blurred rhapsody contained below a prairie’s defining horizon line; the intensified scent of sagebrush and juniper in desert’s extreme heat; the glow of sheep’s wool in moonlight; and the dense silence found inside north-facing conifer forests. These intangible and ephemeral phenomenon find their way into my paintings.
I am curious about my orientation to the natural world and explore, in paintings, places from various vantage points. My gaze may be directed upward into a stand of quaking aspen leaves. From an aerial view, I wonder about migratory birds below, resting on tundra. I imagine the rhizosphere, underground. Inward, I consider life at a cellular level. Sometimes paintings evoke spaciousness and inspire a long-view; otherwise they are intimate and awaken consideration of the unseen.