2009 Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing, Graduated with Honors from Concordia University, Montreal Quebec. 

Artist Statement

I am contemporary visual artist. My work aims to challenge the limits of traditional landscape painting and push it towards contemporary conceptual art.

My central muse is the demystification of Western landscape.

At a first glance, my paintings appear like classic prairie or ‘Western’ scenes; big skies, signs of agriculture, open spaces. My work deliberately aims to disrupt our familiarity and preference for this type of scenery. Instead of idealized cowboy imagery, more problematic motifs are centralized; abandoned trailer homes, a strewn shopping cart in a riverbed, uneasy animal gazes, signs of human impact. All of them tell a story. The viewer is caught within the tension of the mythic West (freedom, beauty, vastness, opportunity) and the real West (environmental degradation, industry, urban encroachment, hyper individualism). Romanticism and sentimentalism become paradoxical.

Mood in my work acts in the same way. During my undergraduate studies at McGill University I became fascinated by the aesthetic of the sublime, first described in the 18th century by Edmund Burke as an experience of the infinite that simultaneously terrifies and inspires, an awareness of our relative insignificance that gives way to an ultimate experience of beauty and awe. I realize now that sublime as an aesthetic is only an accessory to a broader philosophy. Evolutionism, naturalism, existentialism… As humans no matter our religion there are always moments we share these feelings, especially when faced with the magnitude of nature. 

As such my compositions include both complementary and oppositional elements, juxtaposing light and dark, and harnessing a sense of containment and security confronted with a yearning to escape. The human is the viewer caught in this predicament of existence. Landscape painting becomes a visual study of how we as humans understand our place within an environment.

The archetypes and mythology that surround Western landscape have long become the primary way in which North American nation states define themselves. Investigating and unpacking this is not only historically interesting, it’s relevant to the current upheavals in redefining ourselves internally and globally.

There are moments I veer away from landscape and it’s storytelling potential. Regardless of subject matter, it has always been especially interesting to me to present something commonly understood to be ugly as beautiful. This flip causes an unlearning, a de-categorization in our minds of how we have culturally come to understand all things. We consider the object for the very first time, because it has been presented as worthy of our attention. The realm of new objects and meanings that can be considered becomes infinite. Asking the viewer to notice something we would typically walk right past is just part of my job.

As artists we have many different purposes. I see mine as truth seeker…. to help the viewer truly see what is in front of them, instead of that which they would prefer to believe.

Technique

Rosanna’s work has a very distinctive technique defined by layers of thinly applied oil based pigments on a wood canvas. Because of how they are diluted and absorbed, the natural grain of the wood remains visible. She builds images slowly by adding layer upon layer, allowing the scene to feel embedded in the material. Because of this, her images acquire an uncanny sense of depth and a quiet luminosity. She is interested in capturing the mood of a sense, not its exact representation.

Biography

Rosanna Marmont works from her studio in Tucson, Arizona. She is a Canadian with New Zealand origins and currently lives and practices in Tucson Arizona. Her paintings and sculptures are sold internationally and are exhibited predominately in Western Canada. 

Born in Waikato, New Zealand in 1987 (her parents were sheep farmers), her childhood was defined by a decisive uprooting from a rural life, followed by continuous travel and exploration. Her first experience of Western landscape was at age six while living in a log cabin on the 30,000 acre Waldron ranch north of Pincher Creek, Alberta. The impact of this wild and unpopulated landscape would late become a central muse of her creative explorations, as she returned to it again and again during her studies at Concordia University. After obtaining a BFA majoring in painting and drawing, Rosanna’s work has ever since looked to Western landscape. Her technique of emphasizing the wood grain through hundreds of thinly applied layers of oil pigments is self-developed and unique to her work. Conceptually she addresses our human relationship to land and the romanticism, identity, nationality, culture, and aesthetics we both prescribe and derive from it. 

“As sheep and cattle farmers in New Zealand, the working of the land for my family was the most simple and direct manner in which identity, belonging and purpose within a physical context was determined. Having been uprooted from this original homeland and place of familiarity, Alberta’s landscape became a metaphor for our predicament. The infinite space and luminous distant horizons were allegories of yearning, of greener grass on the other side, of new beginnings. The subliminal nature of empty expansive land simultaneously enticed and estranged, promising both escape as well as a home to lay claim to and create permanence. This personal story of land and landlessness in my family has since broadened to an ongoing study of Western landscapes and our complex relationship as humans to our environment.”