Save the Date - July 29th - Irvine Fine Arts Center

Irrational Caring

I will paint a 13 x 13 foot wall painting incorporating paintings made by other artists - Joshua Aster, Danial Mendel Black, Frank Ryan, Nihura Montiel, Alexandra Grant, Pearl C. Hsiung, Lucas Reiner, Analia Saban, Brian Porray, Julian Rogers, Fran Siegal, Nikko Mueller, Stephanie Pryor, Noah Davis, Sabina Ott, and Marie Thibault - as collage material.
        

LIFE PIERCING ART
A BOOK OF PORTRAITS AND SELF – PORTRAITS
By Rosanna Albertini
ORESTE & Co. Publishers, Los Angeles, 2013

Nine portraits of women, nine artists finding in art the core of their own lives: KIM ABELES, SIMONE FORTI, DOMINIQUE MOODY, HILJA KEADING, KAREN CARSON, KRISTIN CALABRESE, ERIN COSGROVE, RACHEL MASON, DAWN KASPER. They squeezed from their liquid substance fruits that never grow in nature, and visions that history would not welcome. Yet, they happen to be in the world, sharing the same reality as everybody else.
         The portraits are in words, the self-portraits in images.

Limited edition, 100 copies numbered and signed, 7’ x 8’ ½, 200 pages.
Price: $ 150.  It’s a hand made book designed, sewn by hand and published by the same person who wrote it.

Rosanna Albertini, the author of the text and of the book as an object, is a scholar who became a journalist, a journalist who became an art-writer and a curator, moved from the eighteenth century philosophy to contemporary art, from Italy and France to Los Angeles, where researching and teaching (at USC, UCLA, Otis School of Art and Design) joined writing and craftwork. Life Piercing Art is the n.3 of the Collection “The Red Thread” after New Zealand with an Italian Accent, 2010 and White Owls – Artists I Found in Los Angeles 1994-2011, 2011.

For other books and articles, see her web-site: albertini.ws
To purchase the book send an e-mail: rosanna@albertini.ws

As an artist, I'm interested in the truth. I realize the truth is subjective, so I'm interested in telling the truth from my perspective, or at least telling some sort of story that often lays waste to conventional happy platitude thinking.  I don't always know what I'm doing when I embark on a painting.  Most of the paintings are about more than one thing. I usually discover the meaning of the painting either while I'm making it or much later. This keeps it exciting to me.

I'm also really interested in the flatness of the picture plane - whether or not there's the illusion of space on the canvas, the truth is it's colored areas placed next to each other on a flat surface - that are actually stacked up on top of each other given the normal orientation of a painting hanging on the wall. I get lucky when abstract composition reads distinctly at the same time as (and often in opposition to) painted imagery.

I started painting seriously in the late 80's.  One of the main motivations for painting initially, was that I wanted to visually communicate to other people like me (misfits) and tell them they weren't alone like I wished someone would have done for me. My relationship with painting has changed over the years, becoming something my life is organized around.  Painting really gives back. Each painting leads to another painting and back into other paintings and forwards to more new paintings.  It makes for a very rich inner life expressed on the outside.

Click on "oil on canvas" to see my paintings.

FIGHTING THE GOOD FIGHT!