Amelia Rozear: Magical Moments

Artist Amelia Rozear working on a self portrait in the studio

*Catharsis,* watercolor and graphite powder, 2023

Website: https://www.arozear.com/

Instagram: @arozear

Amelia Rozear is a Providence based painter, illustrator, and teaching artist with a love of traditional media. Her work is inspired by bouts of nostalgia and dissociative daydreams, and is a celebration of girlhood, memory, and the wonders of the natural world.

How did your creative journey begin?

Since birth, I’ve looked up to my two grandmothers Marcia and Mary Anne for artistic inspiration. Marcia finds creative satisfaction through miscellaneous home projects, costume design, and gardening, while Mary Anne sees the world through watercolor and oil paint. It was under their guidance that I developed the one hobby I would never grow tired of. The inkling of passion I started with quickly grew into a hailstorm of sketchbooks, “how to draw” on-demand TV programs, and a drive to tell visual stories that’s persisted to this day. My grandmothers continue to nurture my creative inclinations– Marcia answers all of my persisting textile questions, and Mary Anne still mails me most– if not all– of her secondhand painting materials. I’d truly be nowhere without them.

Where do you find inspiration for your work?

When it comes to developing an image, I am always drawn to outliers– something a bit out of place, a bit surreal. Something that makes you tilt your head and spend an extra moment perusing the scene. It’s easy to find inspiration for work like this in coastal New England, with its historical libraries, old cemeteries, and oddity shops strewn about.

Recently I’ve been taken by the abstract beauty of textiles, and have been “stitching” together painted landscapes of my own through the manipulation of pattern and texture. Art Nouveau has also shaped my work, ever since discovering an Alphonse Mucha art book in a museum gift shop I’ve been stunned by his ornamental framing of figures and fluid characterization of different themes. Tarot is another heavy influence– over the initial quarantine of 2020, I developed a deep appreciation for the symbolism in the artwork of the Rider-Waite deck. During lockdown, I created and published The Curious Travels Tarot Deck of my own. The whimsy and small stories within the cards continue to inspire my work today.

How has your work evolved over the last few years?

Over the past few years, my focus has sporadically shifted from material to material, idea to idea. First, it was exploring the industry world of character design, primarily through digital media. I quickly hit a standstill– the medium was too static for me, and a bursting joy for traditional artmaking completely took hold. The beauty of being a self-directed artist is that I’m not bound to a specific project or style– I am free to keep exploring, to have spontaneous ideas and run with them, and to keep discovering myself along the way.

What does a typical day in the studio look like for you, and how has your art practice grown or changed?

One of my biggest goals for 2023 was to obtain my own studio space, and I’m proud to say– with help from my dear friends, of course– I found one! One floor up from my apartment lives my painting studio, rug-tufting corner, business hub, and miscellaneous endeavor laboratory. To have such a space so close to me is wonderful– my motivation to begin projects has skyrocketed just as fast as my wall space is disappearing.

Due to my disastrously short attention span, I tend to always have multiple projects running at a time to stay productive. I’ll switch between two paintings at a time on my desk, while simultaneously chipping away at various tufting projects. My watercolor sketchbook is another perpetual (seemingly endless) project, which is especially refreshing because it’s not bound to one room.

Which experiences have impacted your work as an artist?

The most formulating experience for me as an artist continues to be my role as an older sister. The shift from girlhood to adulthood is often a painful one, and watching my two younger siblings go through it (and continue to go through it) is not always an easy feat. Some of my work exists as a means of preserving the simplicity of our shared girlhood– feeling unified in our ignorance and the world. Other pieces explore the pain of self-discovery, blossoming mental illness, and a deeper nihilism we’ve all seemed to find growing up.

This sway between harmony and detachment can be seen through self-inserted characters, often with faraway gazes, and their relationship with the scene around them. Sometimes it’s seamless- complete harmony with the landscape and background, the two coming together in a vibration of impressionist color. Other times it’s disconnected— planes isolated from each other through graphic insets and muted palettes. This use of paneling is an ode to my love of sequential illustration and graphic novels, something that provided me much comfort during times of adolescent distress.

Since painting continues to be a stress relief method for me, a lot of my characters are at rest– sleeping, wandering, relatively sedentary. I believe it’s a prevailing goal in my work to give my past self (and those I hold dear) relief in exquisite, magical moments.

How has social media impacted your work?

Since high school, I’ve been a curious spectator online– watching artists share their work and engage with an accessible audience through apps and comment sections. Upon graduating from art school, I finally found the time to fully commit to my accounts. At first, it was entirely unusual to document the creation process, but as my number of posts grew, I began to look back on them fondly, like a collection of video diaries.

There’s always an inherent pressure when it comes to social media– the compulsion to create only what you think people will like and share. The crushing despair that comes when a piece falls flat does horrors to an artist’s psyche, and getting over this anxiety is still something I’m working towards. Overall, social media has allowed me the freedom of self-direction, which I am endlessly grateful for. Being able to create genuinely and share it with a receptive audience is such a gift– and while I’m not 100% reliant on my income from social media, it has been a delight to invest what I do make back into my small business.

How does your process inform your work?

I tend to paint in a stream-of-consciousness style, capturing images (sometimes more and one on a canvas) as they come to me. Often I refer to these paintings as “mindscapes”, and create them as a method of sorting out my tangled trains of thought.

A prevalent theme in my artmaking process is layering. In my sketchbook, I layer acrylic, graphite powder, watercolor, and sometimes metallics over each other to enrich seemingly simple scenes. Upon flat planes of color, I use different palettes and paints to carve out characters from their landscapes– sure to leave exposed patches underneath. The underlayers radiate through the final image, culminating in a haze of distressed marks, vibrating texture, and rich transparency.

Victoria FryJanuary 11, 2024