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

Artwork

Rosanna Marmont is a contemporary painter (born 1987) whose work challenges the limits of traditional Western landscape painting and pushes it towards contemporary conceptual art. She is a Canadian with New-Zealand origins and currently lives  and practices in Tucson Arizona. 

Her core subject; the demystification of the Western landscape. 

At first glance, her paintings look like classic prairie or “Western” scenes: big skies, rural cues, open space.Rosanna deliberately disrupts that tradition.

Instead of idealized cowboy imagery, she instead includes more problematic motifs; , abandoned trailer homes, a strewn shopping cart in a riverbed, uneasy animal gazes, subtle or overt signs of human impact. The viewer is caught within the tension between mythic West (freedom, beauty, vastness) and  real West (decay, industry, urban encroachment). Her work is less “celebration” and more questioning of Western identity and mythology. Western landscape (just like the cowboy archetype) has become central to the way in which Canada, the United States, and parts of Mexico define themselves. Investigating and unpacking this is not only historically interesting, it’s persistently relevant to current redefining of identity for both North American nation states and their residents, both internally and globally. 

Rosanna’s work has a very distinctive technique, in which she uses oil based pigments like watercolor on a wood canvas. Because of how they are diluted and absorbed, the  natural grain of the wood remains visible. She builds images through many thin layers of diluted oil paint, allowing the scene to feel embedded in the material . Her images acquire an uncanny sense of depth and a quiet luminosity. She is interested in capturing mood, not its exact representation of a scene. Rosanna’s work explores how human emotions are ascribed onto a landscape as we gaze out at it. Each painting contains elements that are both complementary and oppositional, light versus dark, escape versus containment, romanticism and sentimentalism as paradoxical. Landscape painting is her visual study of how how we as humans understand our place within an environment.

Biography

Rosanna Marmont works from her studio in Tucson, Arizona. Her paintings and sculptures are sold internationally and are exhibited predominately in Western Canada. 

Born in rural New Zealand (her parents were sheep farmers), her childhood was defined by a pivotal uprooting followed by continuous travel and exploration. Her first experience of Western landscape was at age six while living in a log cabin on the Waldron ranch north of Pincher Creek. The impact of this wild and unpopulated landscape would late become a central muse of her creative endeavors, 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 drawn from the profound nature of 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 retrospective of land and landlessness in my family has since broadened to an ongoing study of Western landscapes and our complex relationship as humans to land.”