Rosanne M. Shea
Fine Artist
This site is under construction. Please be patient, and more art and more of the story will be posted.
My earliest memories of drawing are from when I was 4 years old. I knew from an early age that art was a key anchor of my identity. From realism to surrealism to abstraction, from portraiture to landscape, still life, illustration of natural forms and the human figure my major work over the years has included photography, digital work, watercolor, graphite, oil, scratch board, and most recently three dimensional mixed mediums with mosaic, tesserae, found materials and resin poured pieces.
Patina is created on the surface of copper flashing with salt and ammonia.
My ideas sometimes come to me in those twilight moments when first awakening but before I open my eyes. The idea of connecting Waterbury, my hometown to the sea, through the use of copper in my work came to me this way. Waterbury was once known as the brass capital of the world, with several of the biggest brass companies headquartered here in the earlier part of the 20th century. The beautiful teal patina of oxidized copper is one of my favorite colors, and thus, the colors of copper and the sea meet.
Speeding the process of oxidation of copper can be achieved by sanding copper sheeting with fine sand paper, then sprinkling with sea salt, spraying with ammonia and leaving for several hours in a tightly sealed container with some ammonia in the bottom. The fume chamber created by the sealed box allows the process to occur overnight.
Found objects,
"The Exchange" Public Art Project
Current work: "Where Does It All Go?" - ongoing public art project under the auspices of somethingprojects.net
The world belongs to all of us and each of us is charged with her care. What we do in Waterbury, CT matters to the brooks, the rivers, the ocean, the seas and ultimately, the world. Where does it all go? The waste water, trash, even some recyclables we intend to send to the proper destinations sometimes end up in the sea. Everything we do when we engage with the environment matters; it has an impact whether small or great.
My work in this project includes drawings, painting, sculpture, found and collected objects, concrete plaques, oxidized copper, and poured resin plaques all installed in various sites in my community of Waterbury, Connecticut, and eventually expanding to other communities in the Naugatuck River Valley. Sustainability and ocean conservancy is the message and the delivery of that message comes in the form of visual reminders the viewer receives by looking at the work in personal, intimate spaces. Clues to the whereabouts of the sequence of installations will be found embedded in the work in the form of QR codes that lead the viewer to a website with information. Viewers will find links to websites focused on sustainability, ocean conservancy and other environmental efforts such as organic gardening, composting, reducing, up-cycling, recycling, repairing, repurposing and other important ecological efforts.
Where Does It All Go?
Site 1 and Site 2
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Mono-engraving - "Scratch Art"
"Creation Story"
Mono-engraving is my term for the technique of scratching into a black coating to expose the white surface underneath on a rigid panel. Through techniques of hatching, cross hatching, scribble and contour drawing with a sharp razor blade, form and surface texture are expressed. Patterns of marks create light and shading, the more marks, the lighter the value. Where black is wanted no marks are made.
"Queen Ingrid"
"Caitlin's Mask"
"After Fantasia"
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White's Woods
The Archaeology of the Attic
"Armani"
In this series entitled “Origins” I create realist and surrealist dreamscapes using “mono-engraving”, or scratch-art drawing, a technique that involves the scratching of marks into a black ground to reveal the white surface underneath. Using only an exacto blade, I engage in a “stream of consciousness” process, in which very little of the final image is pre-planned, but instead the image emerges in an organic, spontaneous way. References include objects, photos the artist has taken and appropriated images that are transformed and synthesized into an original work. Creatures, objects, natural forms and patterns co-mingle into a world that exists only within the framework of the picture plane and in the imagination of the artist and the viewer.
In the intaglio print-making process of etching, many prints are made with one "plate" into which a stylus has carved and engraved an image. Each one of the pieces in this series is one-of-a-kind, thus each one is a "mono-engraving".
This series grew out of an interest in the deep connections we have with our ancestors, both physically, through DNA and socially as well as spiritually. The relics and heirlooms we prize as manifestations of those connections serve as physical remnants of those who came before and contributed to
