| What if you could never make anything beautiful? And what if you wanted to be an artist but no one would help you, support you, or encourage you? These are two of the many dynamics underscoring Phyllis Rosser’s intent in making art. I met with Rosser recently in her studio on the edge of Soho, having earlier seen her sculptures and paintings installed in two other settings. There, she showed me several of her sculptures, explained her process and fascinated me with stories of retrieving wood from beaches and rivers. |  |
A Place for Beauty – Anne Swartz
What if you could never make anything beautiful? And what if you wanted to be an artist but no one would help you, support you, or encourage you? These are two of the many dynamics underscoring Phyllis Rosser’s intent in making art.
I met with Rosser recently in her studio on the edge of Soho, having earlier seen her sculptures and paintings installed in two other settings. There, she showed me several of her sculptures, explained her process and fascinated me with stories of retrieving wood from beaches and rivers. She also explained the painstaking process involved in her richly imaged paintings of flowers, up close, but very much not Georgia O’Keeffe.
Rosser sculpts abstract wall- and floor-related pieces and installations from driftwood first found on the Jersey shore and, more recently, found at a river dam in Bellows Falls, Vermont. The wood has already naturally dried when she finds it; she collects it, eventually constructing branches and fragments into forms. She also paints detailed, hyper-realistic images. Despite the obvious resemblance in description to O’Keeffe’s full frontal views of flowers, Rosser’s paintings are carefully painted in a way O’Keeffe’s flowers never were. Also, Rosser’s palette is highly saturated and shaded so the images have depth and richness where O’Keeffe’s paintings are light and evanescent.
Rosser explained her evolution as an artist, feminist and activist, from her life as a housewife and mother of three. Discouraged by her constrained options in suburban New Jersey, she went to work in New York City in 1973 at Ms. Magazine, a year after its founding. Friends with Gloria Steinem since college, Rosser sought an opportunity to connect to the world beyond her suburban quarters.
At first, she began to collect wood without any specific purpose. A confrontation with an unfeeling neighbor resulted in Rosser shaping the wood into a unified form in 1968, about which she has written, “It was a totem of my rage at the time—of being confined, isolated in a suburban neighborhood where I couldn’t relate to anyone.”
The ideas about sculpture percolated for another decade until she became a student of sculptor Nancy Azara, whose teaching and work in found objects helped Rosser connect with her desire to be an artist. “She gave me permission to do what I wanted with art.” Rosser began making sculptures and paintings in earnest, while becoming renowned for her research on gender inequities in testing, particularly the Scholastic Aptitude Test (S.A.T.).
Rosser rapidly moved from making painted wood sculptures to leaving the wood bare. Her sculptures have a discrete, decorative quality, maintaining the beauty, sensuality and naked appeal of the wood’s hewn surface, like many fence posts put together, which recalls her childhood remembrances of fences. “My father had a farm, an ugly farm, with a brown stucco farmhouse. He would make my brother and I work there every weekend. I loved the fence.”
The works also resemble shields or rustic fences in their ovoid and horizontal shapes. “The sculptures are determined by the available pieces of wood,” Rosser explained. The final results in most of the wood works are a calligraphic, linear quality—like handwriting in the linked and laid pieces of wood of her sculptures. Evident in her wall sculptures is a connection to many of the 20th century painters who freed line from description, such as Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly. Rosser takes the emancipation of line to the next level, evident in comments from her writing like “So the sticks become my lines.” The line of the forms seem to follow throughout the composition, breaking and undulating, recalling their surging through water.
On one occasion, Rosser stacked them like a conventional vertically-oriented totem, showcasing some of her influences, both acknowledged and unconscious. Much of the direct and immediate primacy of the materials in her work recalls both West and East African art, examples of which are evident in her environment. Rosser acknowledges an affinity with sculptors like Louise Nevelson, which is evident in the small pieces, as well as in the totem-shaped work.
The idea of natural prosperity and abundance quietly exists alongside emotional prosperity and abundance in these works. I was struck by the resemblance of many of the wood pieces to bones and realized that Rosser’s works often look like archeological objects, culled together with the slight variations in the colors adding to the quiet energy of their otherwise nearly monochromatic surfaces. This energy emanates from the size of the pieces she has incorporated into the sculptures and from the deceptively casual arrangement of the composition, recalling the carefree disarray of naturally collected piles of wood.
As an experiment, Rosser expanded on the boundaries of her wall-hung pieces to create an installation in a corner, related to both the wall and floor, called Fantasy Garden. While maintaining her clear interest in natural beauty, something different operates here. Specifically, this work takes the idea of wild nature and embraces it in a way that her other sculptures seem to embrace more tenuously, perhaps because of their relatively smaller size and scale. Rosser says she is heading more in this direction, conceptualizing more such installation work. She has written, “I want everything to be larger than life.”
In the early 90s, she began painting flowers as an extension of her interest in nature and started taking painting classes with artist Grace Graupe-Pillard. Simultaneously, Rosser stopped painting the sculptures, feeling that, "the sculptures were more sophisticated without paint.” Thus, the paintings became, Rosser says, “an outlet for my interest in color.” For both the sculptures and paintings, she notes, “I am seeking beauty in the mundane.” Rosser didn’t have the support of her parents as a child to make art, despite receiving scholarships to study at the Rochester Memorial Art Gallery, near her childhood home. Where the sculptures are masculine, involving physical activities of dragging, hauling, and holding the wood, the paintings are feminine, more sensitive in form, Rosser explained. They are usually medium format canvases of flowers in a shaded and saturated palette. Rosser only works on her paintings about one day a week, meaning that it can take her a year to complete one.
The persistence with which she has made art, while raising a family and pursuing her activism as a writer, is perhaps most revealing. Her art showcases the beauty of the everyday and, ultimately, speaks to the desire for opportunity.
