Arts In My Community: Rosemary Wessel's Resonances

Rosemary with some of her paintings...

Last Sunday I had the pleasure of getting a private tour of my friend Rosemary's art show.  She is an artist who lives in my town and had a show for the month of June into July at the Cummington Community House Art Gallery.  Her work is really unique in many ways.  She's a painter (she uses oils) but her canvases are built up and out like 2 dimensional relief sculptures.  There is a lot of texture to her surfaces.  She mainly works BIG.  It's strong stuff... and so far I'm only talking about the superficial qualities of her work! 

Through her paintings, Rosemary shows the energy she perceives coming from people.  The paintings are not portraits in the traditional sense. She takes her subjects up a notch to the energetic level.  Her training and experience doing energy work feeds into her visual manifestations.  Rosemary uses models, including herself and makes molds of their face and/or body parts.  From these casts she creates interesting portraits of emotions, feelings and energy.  Sometimes I saw myself reflected in the emotion coming from her work, sometimes I saw other people I know reflected back to me.  I can relate to what Rosemary is saying through her images, colors and textures about the energy and emotional landscape we as human beings are all a part of and all experience.  I've never seen work like hers.

Feel free to check out more of her work on her website: http://www.rosemarywessel.com/